by João Almino
In his edit, João Almino suggested that I should include here some of Valdivino’s stories in order to captivate the reader. The problem is that we went several months without seeing Valdivino, so how can I invent something out of nothing? Sometimes Aunt Francisca asked Dad about him or said, Oh, he really has disappeared, until we ran into him at the first Mass held in Brasília, on May 3 of that year, 1957, a day that began with an argument between Dad and Aunt Francisca about the resurrection of Christ. The debate confused me, and, without uttering a peep, I intuitively took Aunt Francisca’s side. It’s not true that Christ died to save us, because, if he was resurrected, then he didn’t actually die, said Dad, provoking Aunt Francisca, You’re going to hell, she replied, Religion is the true hell, if you study history, you’ll see how much violence and crime religion has caused, Then just stay home, don’t go to the Mass, because it’ll be a sacrilege, I’m going today because of what it symbolizes. And then he explained to us that JK, who would be present at the Mass, had chosen May 3 because of its proximity to the anniversary of the first Mass that Pedro Álvares Cabral ordered to be held, which marked the discovery of Brazil, and this other Mass, four hundred years later, represented, according to the president, the true appropriation of the national territory.
All of us—me, Dad, Aunt Francisca, and Aunt Matilde—headed out to a spot near the large cross, where more than fifteen thousand people had gathered from all over Brazil, traveling in open-back semi-trucks, hundreds of automobiles, and around forty airplanes. I had never seen so many children in one place. I was fascinated with the Carajá Indians who were wearing feathers and the women from Rio in their long dresses, which went only halfway down the shin. Those dresses were designed in Paris, commented Aunt Matilde, who herself was showing hips that were almost bursting out of her tight blue dress, which was, according to Aunt Francisca, also indecent, mainly because it didn’t have sleeves, You can’t show up in front of the Archbishop like that, he’ll send you straight home, Matilde, predicted Aunt Francisca.
Aunt Francisca wanted to see the image, brought for the occasion from São Paulo, of Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil’s patroness, who had also been, for less than six months, or rather, since November 14, the patroness of Brasília, per the suggestion of then-bishop Don Hélder Câmara. As she tried to get closer to Our Lady, she spotted Valdivino and waved to him from afar, and he waved back with the gestures and giddiness of a child.
We listened to the sermon by Don Carlos Carmelo de Vasconcellos Motta, Archbishop of São Paulo: “ . . . we shall all rejoice, because we’re living through one of the three greatest events in the glorious history of our homeland. In fact, the discovery of Brazil in 1500, Independence in 1822, and—in the present day—the founding of this new Metropolitan Capital, in the middle of the country, are the three crowning landmarks of the life of the nation,” and with each phrase Valdivino nodded his head in approval.
Dad jotted down Don Carmelo’s words, since he wanted to collect as many arguments as possible against the caustic critiques of the construction of the city.
After the ceremony, while the Carajá Indians—transported there from Bananal Island by the Brazilian Air Force—paid homage to the president by presenting him with spears, war clubs, cudgels, and arrows, Valdivino came running over to meet up with us. He had worked on the construction of the enormous improvised awning over the altar, he told us, and a few days earlier he had worked on the Don Bosco Hermitage, which would be inaugurated the following day, May 4, he had applied some of the last coats of white paint on the building, which was all white, a white that sparkled against the landscape, the first finished building in Brasília, he said, it wasn’t just any old chapel like all the rest, since it would be on the shores of the lake, once the lake was filled in, and its location, together with its sharply angular pyramidal shape, which pointed to the heavens, would attract powerful energies, his girlfriend was the one who showed him that. Hadn’t she disappeared?, asked Dad, No, she’s coming with me tomorrow.
Valdivino wanted to know if we’d seen Bernardo Sayão, I’d really like to meet up with him again, maybe he’s here somewhere in the middle of this crowd, but there are so many people . . . And then he offered us the invitation, I’d really like you all to come to the inauguration of the Hermitage tomorrow.
Faced with Dad’s silence, Aunt Francisca promised that, yes, we would go, all of us. You shouldn’t have spoken for us all, we’re not going to that piece of shit Hermitage, no way, Dad said later, visibly angry.
Still that same day, Valdivino showed up at our house in the Free City, disappointed because, three hours after the Mass ended, they had torn down the awning that he’d helped build. Was that a premonition? Could it be that the things he built wouldn’t stand the test of time? Just remember that the awning was temporary, said Aunt Francisca, calming him down, the churches you build are the things that will remain standing. Are you all really going to come to the inauguration of the Hermitage, do you think you’ll have enough room in the jeep for me?, asked Valdivino, Unfortunately, we can’t go, explained Dad, dryly, But don’t you want to record all the important events?, demanded Aunt Francisca, nothing could be more important than the inauguration of this Hermitage.
Valdivino kept insisting that we come, but we missed the inauguration of the Hermitage, despite Aunt Francisca’s entreaties.
You can go if you want, said Dad, and Aunt Francisca responded that she wouldn’t be able to make it there by herself, Go with Valdivino, In the back of a truck? and plus his girlfriend won’t like that.
Fourth Night: Lucrécia
On the fourth night, Dad, locked up between four dingy walls, told me that some of the most lucrative business ventures in the Free City were the brothels, where, in their free time and on the weekend, the workers spent the money they’d earned from their excessive hours of work. Dad remembered the bars, the drinking binges, and the district of bohemian lifestyles, gambling, and prostitution—the red-light district, called Placa da Mercedes—that were responsible for turning Brasília into a “licentious and immoral city,” as The Globe newspaper asserted on June 16, 1958. There were prostitutes all over—hundreds of them, in whorehouses, bars, and cabarets—because the market was thriving: a lot of men had come to work construction and hadn’t brought their families. There were so many prostitutes that Dad even suggested to Valdivino that, if he wanted to earn a lot of money, he should specialize in fixing beds broken by overuse in the brothels, but Valdivino just repeated, No, Mr. Moacyr, my business is building churches. Women who weren’t prostitutes were rare and, for that reason, highly desired. The scarcity of women contributed, in large part, to the sexual thirst among the men, and Dad was no exception.
My child’s ears were attentive to the stories about this sexual marketplace, and I remember that, when the census came out in July of 1957, Dad complained that for every three men, there were only two women in the Free City, which certainly took into account the prostitutes who resided there, although a lot of them only came for a single night of work, then returned to their hometowns, Formosa or Luziânia. Look here, he said, pointing to the newspaper, In a population of two thousand two hundred people, there are only eight hundred and seventy women, I could practically get to know them all, It’s wonderful, I’m not complaining about it, said Aunt Matilde, We can’t even go out in the street without being harassed, the men here are brazen, shameless, complained Aunt Francisca, Men are just like that, a couple of days ago one of them grabbed my butt, said Aunt Matilde, laughing, And you aren’t complaining?, said Aunt Francisca in protest, The worst is a perverted old man who chases after all the young girls with his cock all hard and then, since they all run away from him, ends up fucking a donkey right in the middle of the street, Don’t talk that way in front of the boy, Matilde, Dad shouted, The only decent man that I’ve met here is Valdivino, a simple, bashful young man, but religious, too, and you can tell that he respects women, it’s true, he’s the only exception around here, he’s
a saint, an innocent, not brazen and obscene like all the rest of the men around here, said Aunt Francisca.
In those moments Aunt Francisca’s admiration for Valdivino made me resentful, and I swore to myself that one day I’d be just like him, but I’d already see myself failing in my attempt. Out on the street the kids messed around with Valdivino, and sometimes I joined in with them and would notice Valdivino shooting me a look of disappointment. The little boys would hit him, and he never reacted, but one day he became enraged and said, You’re going to regret this, I’m going to end up killing one of you. From that day on, we started to respect him, because—as one can infer from the well-known saying—the dog that never barks is the one that bites.
Aunt Francisca’s conviction that Valdivino was different from the rest of the men in the Free City was strengthened, I believe, one day when I was walking beside her along a smoothed-dirt street with no sidewalks, she was wearing a checkered dress, tight at the waist and quite wide at the bottom, the type that gets blown up by a treacherous gust of wind. Some men who had galloped past us on horses, raising up a cloud of dust, turned their heads back when they saw her, she was holding her dress down, and other men, at the shops in front of us, were looking at her intensely, waiting for the chance to relish every centimeter of her dark thighs with their eyes. One of them whistled at Aunt Francisca, then another, and another, it was a whole orchestra of whistles, and suddenly one of them yelled: Let that skirt fly up! And other voices responded: Let it fly! Let it fly! At this point, Aunt Francisca ran off towards Valdivino, who was sitting at his desk out in the open air, transcribing letters, and felt safely sheltered when he considerately offered her his chair.
It was the end of winter of 1957, and Dad, playing the role of tour guide in the Free City, got the sudden idea to show off one of the city’s curiosities: Valdivino, the scribe. The tourist being guided around was an engineer connected to the group that the architect Oscar Niemeyer had brought with him to Brasília, named Roberto Gonçalves, whom Sayão had introduced to Dad at Newcap headquarters. Roberto mentioned the city plan designed by Lúcio Costa, who had won the design competition for the Brasília project in March of that year, and told Dad, After coming to Brasília, I must confess that I’m sorry that I’m not an architect, engineering is prose, but architecture is pure poetry, Niemeyer—the poet of concrete—wants to create a bold city, as he sometimes says, “reason isn’t just the enemy of thought, as Heidegger put it, but also the enemy of imagination,” He’s going to get rich with Brasília, No way, he didn’t even want Israel Pinheiro to give him a commission, because he doesn’t like the word, he’s developing a whole series of projects for just forty thousand cruzeiros a month, I know him pretty well, I’ve spent time with some of the people who came with him, twenty architects in all, but he also brought some people that he wanted to lend a hand to, people who are fun to have around, there’s a doctor, a journalist, an official from the Aviation division, a goalie from the Flamengo soccer team . . . they even started a musical group, with Niemeyer on ukulele.
The fact that Roberto had access to Niemeyer and, through him, to the president, was for Dad the greatest possible letter of introduction, as if he belonged to some special caste. I met an engineer who moves in the social circles at Catetinho and should be coming to pay us a visit, he mentioned at home one day, You’re enchanted by power, protested Aunt Matilde, and her criticism was amplified by the tone in which she pronounced the word “power,” That’s not the reason, this guy knows the city plan of Brasília in detail, and he continued talking about Roberto, who ended up occupying a special place in my infantile imagination, that of a figure who was as majestic as a statue in a public plaza. From what Dad told us, Roberto, the right man in the right place, had taken on big responsibilities and held the key to opportunities that could be opened up to anyone who wanted to work in construction.
Roberto had explained to Dad that, according to Lúcio Costa, the sensibility and reality of Brasília were Brazilian, but had a French affiliation, Just think of the main axis thoroughfares, of the perspectives and proportions of Paris, if you draw a straight line, it’s three kilometers from the Arc du Triomphe du Caroussel to the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, which will be the same distance from the palaces to the television tower. I’d like to see the layout of these worksites, said Dad, Well I’d like to get to know the Free City, replied Roberto, who, living in a prefab public housing unit right in the Pilot Plan, had yet to visit the Free City, Well, come visit, I’ll be your tour guide.
And that’s how, on that day back in September of 1957, Roberto came to visit the Free City for the first time—the fact that it was a day in September might be an unnecessary piece of information, but I prefer to note it here, since Aunt Matilde, during conversations and confessions about our years in the Free City, had this date fresh in her mind when she received me many years later, after I had left home on bad terms with Dad. There wasn’t much to show him, the city was just a cluster of houses made out of boards and asbestos roof-tiles, with three wide and, at that time of year, dusty avenues: Third Avenue, Second Avenue, and Central Avenue, But when it rains, this all turns to mud, Dad told Roberto. And that was when, while walking along Central Avenue, Dad had the idea to show him that curiosity. Aunt Francisca had already called me over for us to leave, since Valdivino had just received a customer. Wait a bit, I insist on walking you all home, Valdivino had promised, and upon the arrival of Dad and Roberto we made a little circle around the young scribe, Roberto feeling moved not only by the skill of that simple young man in precisely and rapidly putting the dictated words on paper, but also by the observation he’d made about Lúcio Costa’s city plan, The plan for Brasília is divinely inspired, so much so that the architect said that the solution wasn’t sought out, it emerged, so to speak, already complete; for me it’s obvious, it was whispered from above, by Don Bosco.
Since the conversation was dragging on and Dad had invited Roberto to come to our house, Aunt Francisca asked Valdivino to make good on his promise, Didn’t you say that you’d walk us home?
We all walked down the avenue together. The person who can really tell you all about the Free City is João, said Dad to Roberto, explaining that in my free time in the afternoon I served as a tour guide for visitors. Roberto then asked me a bunch of questions, and I described, to his great wonder, the whole layout of the city, reciting the names of shops, bars, and hotels.
What a smart little boy, he said in praise, walking with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on Aunt Matilde, who at that point could be seen in the window of our house, like a figure in a painting. Perhaps his eyes had first been attracted there by Typhoon, who was barking from his post under the window. He doesn’t bite, I said, trying to set him at ease, but Typhoon wouldn’t stop barking and came at Roberto, as if he wanted to attack him. I bent down to grab hold of Typhoon, but he slipped out of my hands, took off, and went straight back for Roberto’s feet, barking all the while, then eventually he responded to Dad’s commands and went over to the front door of the house, but he kept on barking and was at the ready.
Aunt Matilde, impassive, displayed her décolleté beauty in the window. When we entered the house, she had sat down, with her hands folded on her lap, her head raised elegantly. She had an independent way about her, which included the capacity to be unpleasant as she expressed her graceful, yet sharp-edged style, if not downright aggressive.
Let’s leave Aunt Matilde there immobile for a moment to say, in a brief parenthesis, that the fact that Typhoon had reacted so oddly to the presence of Roberto was a subject of conversation in our house for a long time. Dad disciplined him, but he only stopped barking when Valdivino calmed him down with his gentle voice, This engineer here is our friend, Typhoon, he said as he stroked his head.
Roberto resumed the conversation about the construction of Brasília, It’s already been a month since work first started on the Monumental Axis Highway, I don’t know if you all have been past there, bu
t you can already start to get a sense of the space, Brasília’s detractors don’t have a leg to stand on, nobody has ever seen anything like what this city will be, the president was right when he said back in March, talking about the results of the competition, that the impact of this move will even affect the mentality and the manner of feeling of the Brazilian people, That’s what my companion says, too, said Valdivino, that a new humanity is going to emerge, What attracts me most is that the city is going to be vibrant, pleasant, and fitting for intellectual endeavors, a cultural epicenter of the brightest people in the country, added Roberto, I’ll have to see it first, commented Aunt Matilde, raising her eyebrows and adding a skeptical smile to her large eyes, This is already a certainty, replied Roberto, serious and restraining his irritation, And once they put in the lake?, asked Valdivino, There aren’t going to be any residential buildings alongside the lake, replied Dad, It’s true, the banks are going to be left intact, with groves of trees and fields, the only things allowed at the edge of the lake will be clubs, restaurants, spas . . . anything that’s oriented towards recreation, Perhaps you all could take us out there, requested Aunt Francisca, Now it’s my turn, I’ll be the tour guide this time, said Roberto, there isn’t yet much to see in the area near the lake, but we can already get a sense of what the Monumental Axis will be like.