Free City

by João Almino

  For many years, I thought that, unlike the justice system, which let Dad go around with impunity, my conscience would have to punish him. Today, now that the justice system has punished him—albeit for reasons other than Valdivino’s disappearance—and Dad is already dead, I think that a crime without evidence or witnesses, as terrible as it may be, should not soil Dad’s memory nor drown my conscience in a sea of guilt.

  I’ll confess to you all something I never said to Dad: that in those bygone days, I, too, felt that I was Valdivino’s murderer, a remorseless murderer. I wanted him to die, I wanted it badly, perhaps more than anyone else. On the day of April 22, 1960, when Dad told me what had happened to Valdivino and buried all his papers, my sadness at having missed the Childrens’ Festival was replaced with a feeling of relief.

  And why do you want to solve this problem?, not every problem has a solution, these were the last words I ever heard Dad utter, between four dingy white walls.

  Our past is hidden behind barriers that are sometimes impenetrable and is only revealed by chance, here and there, when we suddenly call it forth by a token, a word, a smell, a taste, or any random detail, like someone looking at a whole landscape through tiny holes in a wall. Staring out at the pool behind my house and at Paranoá Lake, I cried and cried, copiously. The landscape of Brasília was filled with silk floss trees, bougainvillea vines, ixora shrubs, fountain trees, touch-me-nots, and nightshades. What I was looking out at was a poor imitation of what had once been, or still was, its perfection; the past was merely one possible memory, a bunch of scraps tossed to me by the people around me. My efforts had been useless, and a part of me that I had once thought nonexistent, now hurt me deeply as it was being amputated. Dad had died, and I, who had always known that I was an orphan, that Dad was not my biological father, truly felt like an orphan for the first time.

  On the day of the burial, there was a curious coincidence. I felt that I knew, from somewhere, the woman with straight black hair who owned the funeral parlor close to my house in Lago Sul, with whom I arranged for the burial. Her black eyes made me remember something forgotten from my childhood, they were one more of those details that appeared like a crack in the wall, through which an entire horizon of the past could be revealed. Are you from Brasília?, I asked her, I was a pioneer, she replied with pride, lived out in Candangolândia, I went to school in Candangolândia when I was a child, I told her, Oh! was her only response, accompanied by a slight affirmative movement of her head. I left there certain that she was the girl with braids from my childhood, whom I had never seen since, the one who used to ride around on her bicycle, with whom I had fallen in love, and whose name I never knew.

  Dad’s burial, like Bernardo Sayão’s, took place in the Field of Hope, in the presence of a half-dozen people, including Aunt Francisca, his widow. She now seemed shorter than she did in my memories of childhood, and not only because of her bowed body. Her gentle eyes were little islands of beauty and youth in a sea of wrinkles. In my mind as a little boy, I had exaggerated Aunt Francisca’s affection for Valdivino and reduced her interest in Dad to almost nothing. From the fights between the two of them, I had deduced incompatibility, if not enmity, unable to discern in them the fomentation of a love that was built on familiarity, a multifaceted love, like all the loves that last.

  I’ve never forgotten the words of Aunt Francisca days after the supposed murder of Valdivino, words that filled me with an awful fear when I was a child, because I immediately connected Valdivino’s demise with what had happened between Aunt Matilde and me. I thought about omitting this part of the story, but allow me to tell it all. I lost that fear when Aunt Matilde took me in after my falling-out with Dad, so much so that one night I dared to put my hand on her thighs and slide it underneath her skirt until I was caressing her most intimate part, my finger penetrating inside it leisurely and tenderly, until I felt Aunt Matilde’s wet pleasure, I’ve never forgotten, I wanted to say to her, it’s the only thing in my life that I regret not doing, you’re not my aunt by blood, I don’t see anything too wrong with it, it’ll be a revolutionary act on our part, what are you afraid of, Aunt Matilde? No, I can’t, was all she said, after a prolonged and pleasurable hesitation, But you’re not my real aunt, That’s not why, let’s remain friends, I don’t want to ruin our relationship—she was reluctantly and slowly removing my finger—That’s just bourgeois morality, I replied, It may be, but it’s stronger than I am.

  Aunt Francisca, I’ve spent this week gathering information from Dad about those first few years in the Free City, and we ended up talking a lot about Valdivino. You used to like him . . . I said, still at the cemetery.

  He was a humble young man, very polite, he didn’t deserve what happened to him.

  Maybe you don’t remember, but one time you mentioned that he died because of sex within his family.

  I don’t know if Íris was his mother or not, it seems that when he was a child she told him that he’d been left on the doorstep, but when she wanted to end her crazy relationship with him, she told him she was his mother.

  We walked past the grave of an American—which a blog-reader informed me belonged to the same Joana Lowell Bowen that Dad knew from his time in Goiás, the owner of a farm close to where we used to live, the woman who drove a Volkswagon bus in the Belém-Brasília Caravan—and we were able to find Bernardo Sayão’s grave nearby. I had never seen Sayão, but Dad would certainly be pleased to know that Aunt Francisca and I paid homage to Sayão out there, for ourselves and on Dad’s behalf as well. The cemetery looked nothing like the one from Sayão’s burial. In that distant past there were a multitude of living beings, and just one dead man below the ground. Now the ground was full of the dead, and we, the few living beings, were walking along it on a cold winter morning.

  Back at home, flipping through my old records, I listened to the main march of the suite On the Way to Brasília, which Heckel Tavares had dedicated to Bernardo Sayão, the engineer who helped build an entire city by sheer force of will, an iron will, and willpower is like the strength of the wind that blows against a sailboat out on the high seas. All it takes is the strength of the blowing wind to create routes across an infinite sea. It is that strength that makes the boat glide along the water and arrive at some port, even if it’s not the one we’d hoped for. Willpower alone, like a blowing nothingness, was capable of creating movement in the world.

  Today, writing on the patio of the house on the lake that will soon no longer be mine, I am thinking intensely about Dad. My wife and children have already gone to bed, and the melancholy silence is only broken by the sound of a cricket. I wish I hadn’t been so hard on Dad, I shouldn’t have asked him such troubling questions, which turned out to be useless and might have hastened his death, because what he told me didn’t solve the mystery, on the contrary, the mystery just kept growing, like a monster; I should have let him die in peace, should have sought him out only to express my affection. If I could, I would go back and do those visits differently, and then this would be a different book, although it’s likely that nothing more would have been revealed about the mystery surrounding Valdivino.

  In that distant era, in those by-gone days of 1960, when Brasília was just coming to life, the newspapers and the magazine O Cruzeiro were busy with the crime wave in Rio: the Sacopã murder, and the murders of Dana de Teffé, and Aída Curi. There was an absolute silence surrounding Valdivino and the Garden of Salvation, the case was surrounded by a fortress of purity, or merely surrounded by whispers and rumors, like those that are still passed around in the corridors and basements of the Esplanade. To this day, the mystery of Valdivino has been forgotten, and out in the Garden of Salvation, the prevailing version of the story ended up being the one in which there was no crime at all, just a miracle.

  On the day of Valdivino’s death, if he did in fact die, I had to stay at home the whole morning and most of the afternoon. I didn’t even go out into the streets, which I assumed were deserted. I think it was on th
at afternoon—when Dad arrived home full of anxiety and showed me the hole in which he was going to bury his papers—that, for the first time, I thought of becoming a journalist and writing about the era of the Free City, and it was from a force of will like that of Sayão, from a wind, and from pure strength that the words with which I was able to remember those times past emerged, one after the other, torn from the silence and profound emptiness, like a creation that issues forth from zero, from uncertainty, ignorance, debt, guilt, and all that we lack. I didn’t want to say anything, for memory itself has nothing that it wants to say, it merely speaks amidst oblivion and that which it seeks to hide, and for that reason there is nothing to interpret—words, like memories, are what they are, and nothing more. Looking into the mirror of the past, where at times I don’t even recognize myself, I am inventing nothing, merely writing an account of what I had lived, which stands as a witness, among the many that might be in existence, that may help compose the portrait of an era.

  After months of lessons with Aunt Francisca, on that distant afternoon in 1960, I was finally able to play the accordion. I took it out to Central Avenue as the large, red sun was already kissing the horizon, sat down on a bench in the open air—Typhoon had come with me and sat down at my feet—began to play, and then some people gathered around me. Some even started to shake a leg. Everyone was happy and dancing, except for Dad and Aunt Francisca. Aunt Matilde showed up, chuckled when she saw me, and said, This little boy is going to be a handful! There was a strong breeze, which made Aunt Matilde’s skirt flutter, and a transparent orange hue in the air. We were still in the rainy season, and for that reason the wind was blowing from the north, and not from the east and southeast as it did in the summer, and a mixture of red mud had sullied our boots and shoes on those stretches of land that one day, who knows, would be green.

  JOÃO ALMINO is the author of five novels, of which The Five Seasons of Love and The Book of Emotions are available in English translation. He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, the Autonomous National University of Mexico, and the Universities of Brasília and Chicago. Free City received the Zaffari & Bourbon Literary Award for the best novel published in Brazil between 2009 and 2011, and was short-listed for the Portugal-Telecom and the Jabuti Literary Awards.

  RHETT MCNEIL has translated work by António Lobo Antunes, Gonçalo M. Tavares, A. G. Porta, and Machado de Assis, all for Dalkey Archive Press.

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