by João Almino
Valdivino not only knew plants like nobody’s business, he knew birds as well. While we walked along, he pointed out to me the nightjar, the kingfisher, the umbrella bird, the bellbird, the tyrant flycatcher, the ovenbird with its nest in a gnarled rosewood tree, the song thrush, the tooth-billed wren, the carrion crow, the lapwing, and the white-naped jay.
We saw another termite mound, One day all of this will be gone, it will be covered with houses and people, the river will be full of garbage, and there won’t be so many animals, like there are now, even these termite mounds will disappear, said Dad, Don’t talk that way, Mr. Moacyr, or God will punish you, replied Valdivino, Well, I’m just being realistic.
Typhoon was barking nonstop. I told Valdivino that out behind our house, one of his favorite pastimes was to bark at white-breasted swallows that perched on the eave I’d built, Oh look at the white-bellied toucan!, said Valdivino, pointing. For me, it was the most beautiful thing we’d seen the entire trip, the toucan perched on a wine palm. I didn’t have the courage to shoot at it with my slingshot. We stopped to show respect to that ten-meter tall palm tree with its fanned-out leaves, Dad said that its trunk could be used to make sturdy houses and its leaves were as good as the best roof-tiles, that you could make palm wine from its fermented sap, which the Indians used to drink, You should never cut down a wine palm, because the wine palm attracts water, it’s the tree of life, explained Dad.
Typhoon was lagging behind, whether out of exhaustion or laziness, I’m unsure. He only looked alert and courageous when he caught the scent of another guinea pig, which was all we got on the return trip.
At one point on the way back, Valdivino turned south, heading towards the Campo Limpo farm. With an arm around Dad’s shoulders, he bid us farewell, saying, Mr. Moacyr, when the path becomes clearer, I’ll finish telling you my story. Dad wished him good luck, and we didn’t suspect that we’d ever see him again.
After a long and exhaustive return trip, already nearing the Free City, we spotted one more termite mound, a red clay sculpture in a spot that was almost devoid of vegetation, This will all be paved over one day, covered with buildings, not a single termite mound will survive, the city is going to be planted here and then more city after that, that’s what the future holds, Dad said to me.
Upon arriving home, it seemed like we’d seen quite a lot, but Dad had promised me much more, we hadn’t come across any tarantulas, centipedes, striped hog-nosed skunks, coatis, or anteaters, which Dad had assured me inhabited the Plateau, nor otters, giant otters, peccaries, or tapirs, which could be found in the rivers or on their banks.
We discovered that we were covered with ticks. Dad and I had some small ones on our arms and legs, and there were some large ones stuck to Typhoon. It took us two days to remove them all carefully, with the help of some rubbing alcohol.
A little over a week later, Aunt Francisca told us, There’s a handsome young man at the door, charming and polite, who says he knows you two. It was the first time that Aunt Francisca had ever seen Valdivino and she took a liking to him, I’m not sure whether because of his intelligence or his fragility.
Back in those days addresses weren’t necessary, we had moved into one of the first houses in the Free City, and it wasn’t hard for Valdivino to find us. He proved himself to be the same talkative young guy from the hunt. He had also returned home covered in ticks and his body still itched. He talked about the founding of the Eclectic City and narrated the arrival of the pilgrims in great detail. No, he hadn’t become separated from the woman who was his traveling companion, she was very temperamental and had decided to abandon him all alone out on those footpaths because of a disagreement they’d had, she didn’t support the idea of him leaving the Eclectic City to dedicate himself to the construction of Brasília.
Full of theories and imagination, Valdivino had, in his simplicity, a refined mind that was attentive to those sorts of details about banal facts that were far from obvious, through which Aunt Francisca discerned in him a sensitive profundity. He’s a prodigy, she used to say, he learns things easily.
That isn’t what Dad, and much less Aunt Matilde, thought about him, for them Valdivino had a talent for talking endlessly and could recognize plants and animals, but nothing more, they didn’t see genius in the art of sprinkling vague thoughts with strange details, but we all agreed on one point: that he was what he appeared to be, averse to all forms of hypocrisy, sincere even while agreeing with everything and everyone, as a result of which it was often necessary to pull off mental contortions that contained flagrant contradictions. He didn’t hide anything, except for the woman who was the love of his life, who always remained shrouded in a mysteriousness that aroused our curiosity. His desire to do the right thing at all times led him to confess his mistakes and attempt to remedy them, to behave in a humble manner that was appreciated by all, and almost always to put other peoples’ opinions ahead of his, as if he preferred to have others think for him. He didn’t act this way out of fear, on the contrary, he was willing to face any dangers he happened to encounter, but was under the impression that he hadn’t encountered any yet. Since he needed very little to be content, he was convinced that the world had, up to that point, treated him well. Sometimes he was unsure about what was right and what was wrong, and was always happy when someone cleared things up for him, although he always considered it wrong to lie, to be cruel to animals, to hurt others, and even to be jealous . . . People were good, it was the world that was cruel and changed them, and only kindness and politeness were able to overcome the cruelty and violence of the world. Valdivino combined ignorance with an enormous desire to learn, grand ideas with minute day-to-day ones, passion with indifference. The impression that I had of him back then was created over the course of many years of familiarity, an impression that lacked the complete sentence that I’m only now able to compose. These days, I understand how Aunt Francisca felt. How could you not feel compassion and affection for such a person?
You’re right, Mr. Moacyr, to want to be a great man and do so many things; you have so many plans, Sir . . . I only have one plan and I’ll be content if I’m able to achieve it, said Valdivino, while all of us were gathered in the living room, for me it’s like this: choose something and remain faithful to it, You’re right about that, Valdivino, replied Aunt Francisca, but what sort of plan is it?, To keep to myself, content with what I have, he confessed, a beatific expression on his face, and out there, in the world, to dedicate myself to one thing, carry out a mission that will be useful to others, Nonsense, that’s just being resigned, it’s conformism, no one can get ahead with that kind of thinking, advised Aunt Matilde, It’s not very easy to be content with the little you’ve got, is it, Valdivino?, replied Aunt Francisca in refutation, There isn’t much that I can do in this world, Dona Matilde, money would only make a difference in the world if I had a lot of it, and my talents aren’t many, the important thing is to have someone beside us that we really like and find the right mission to carry out. He thought that helping to build churches in the new city was the mission to which he’d been called, he had dreamt a beautiful dream in which he was building Brasília and the city had begun with the construction of a church, I want to keep building new churches.
Because of the interest displayed by Valdivino, Dad promised to take him to Newcap and, just the next day, introduced him to no less a figure than Bernardo Sayão. Sayão, without skipping a beat, took him to one of the camps of the workers who were building Brasília, where more than two hundred and thirty migrant workers had already settled down, and where a few days later, on November 10, 1956, beneath an enormous downpour, JK paid a visit. Do jaguars prowl around here?, asked the president, to which Valdivino replied, raising his chin, They don’t bother us: the meat of migrant workers is too tough for jaguars, according to what JK himself transcribed in one of his books. Sayão, who was there at the time, told Dad that he liked the young man’s attitude.
To the blog-reader who asked that I c
ite him as my source, I should make it clear that it’s recorded in one of Dad’s “Onward” notebooks and in various other books that it was also on this occasion that JK asked Bernardo Sayão to move to Brasília definitively, What day would you like me to move here, Sir? Sayão is said to have asked, Yesterday, JK is said to have replied. Early the following day, at six in the morning on November 11, according to how the story goes, as well as what Sayão recounted to Dad, Sayão arrived at Catetinho in a semi-truck, with his wife and two daughters, Where are you going to live?, asked the president, Under that tree, to start with, and after that I’ll set up some kind of shelter.
He needed someone to help him set up the prefab Eucatex boards he was going to use to build the house that ended up on Sossego Street, in Candangolândia, and then he recalled the young man that Dad had brought to him and his attitude from the day before, He’s a good kid and did really good work, he later told Dad. Sayão obtained a lot for him in the Free City, which had only started to take shape with the construction of a bakery and a few other houses. On that lot, Valdivino erected a shack made of wine palm fronds, scraps of boards, leftover Eucatex from Sayão’s house, thick cardboard, and empty cement bags, all of which, according to him, was enough to shelter him from the torrential rains that had already started, planting a physic nut tree—which was willing to die defending him, and whose prickly barbs absorbed any glance from the evil eye—right by the front door.
A friendship soon developed between Valdivino and all of us, but especially between him and Aunt Francisca. He acquired a habit of stopping by our house on his way to or from work and would talk with us as he folded and unfolded his arms, full of admiration for Aunt Francisca. He looked at her as if she were a saint upon an altar, to whom he asked enigmatic questions and requested advice. My opinion doesn’t matter, Valdivino, you’re the only one who can say for sure, she’d reply. He was interested in the books on display on the shelves in the living room. No, she didn’t know much about books, Valdivino should ask Aunt Matilde about them, Aunt Francisca would tell him, and then he’d leave with a book that Aunt Matilde let him borrow. Perhaps because Aunt Francisca, simple and spontaneous like him, naturally understood the things he said, he was extremely courteous towards her, took pleasure in the favors she asked of him, and, when she didn’t ask anything of him, reminded her that he was at her disposal for whatever she needed. For Aunt Francisca, Valdivino made the house—which received very few visits—a cheerier place, and she filled their conversations with inquiries about Bahia, as well as the Eclectic City, which he’d helped build. I listened to those prolonged dialogues without asking any questions, for I was more inclined to observe than to question. But Dad, especially at the beginning, felt uneasy about the friendship between Aunt Francisca and Valdivino, There’s no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman, Francisca, be careful, don’t lead that boy on.
If I’m not mistaken it was January of 1957 when, one day, Dad, Aunt Francisca, and I—as well as Aunt Matilde, who had already arrived by then—were out walking in the vicinity of Valdivino’s shack and came across him hauling a little table and three low stools in a pushcart. A little before Christmas and after an entire day on a Real Airlines flight—which, after leaving at seven in the morning, had stops in Três Pontes, Vargínia, Belo Horizonte, Uberaba, Araguari, Uberlândia, Goiânia, and Anápolis—Aunt Matilde had arrived from Rio, where she’d been living for the last ten years. We were with her, returning from a restaurant that had just opened for business, which belonged to an Italian, Vítor Pelechia, in the area near the wooden bridge over Deep Creek, and had the idea to get coffee at the Confessor Café in the Free City, which back then was just a sparse cluster of houses with about three hundred residents, almost all of them men, and, along with the Candangolândia camp, the only new population hub in the region of the new capital.
Valdivino told us that he made a living as a scribe, writing letters that were dictated to him, and that he’d also worked on the construction of the first church in the Free City, smack in the middle of the rainy season, perhaps the rainiest season in the entire history of Brasília—there still were no decent highways, and the semi-trucks that hauled construction materials to the worksites slid and shimmied all along those sludgy roadways—But at the end I felt very satisfied when I saw the finished church, he said, Me, too, said Aunt Francisca. She had taken me to that church, its simplicity visible in the horizontally rectangular side windows with their white frames, and its solitary tower, only connected to the nave by a canopy that was held up by brown pillars, which matched the color of the mud in the city.
Aunt Matilde just listened, silently, examining with an impatient stare that young man who was both tranquil and talkative.
Dad informed us, in a jesting tone, The first hotel is also being built now, The Brasília Hotel; after a building for confessing, another one to sin in, Behave yourself, implored Aunt Francisca, Seriously, after you build a church you can then build a hotel, Dad proposed, No, after one church, then another, replied Valdivino, A construction worker shouldn’t pick and choose the jobs he takes, Dad advised, But Valdivino isn’t just any old construction worker, he’s an idealist, said Aunt Francisca, defending him.
Valdivino just smiled, the smile of a person who doesn’t take himself too seriously and knows what he wants.
Aunt Francisca told him that the president was going to come eat in the SWAS restaurant sometime soon, You should show up, it’s going to be a special day. Since December of 1956, Aunt Francisca had worked in her new position as caterer and also helped out in the kitchen of the Social Welfare Alimentation Service restaurant, although it would only be formally inaugurated on February 21, 1957. Up until the Japanese arrived in August of 1957 to create a greenbelt in Brasília, it was difficult to get tomatoes, bell peppers, cabbage, and other vegetables. The menu she prepared never varied and included beans, rice, potatoes, chayote, cassava, and—for the engineers—boar, which she bought in Luziânia.
When Dad informed her that Sayão had confirmed JK’s visit to the restaurant, Aunt Francisca figured out all the things the president liked to eat: steak, pork loin or molho pardo chicken, accompanied by—depending on the main dish—rice, beans, cassava flour, okra, French fries, vegetables, cassava-flour porridge, boiled or fried cassava, or even tropeiro beans with kale. As for fruits, jabuticaba fruit, tangerines, mangos, and for dessert, chunky guava jam or dulce de leche with Minas-style cheese.
However, she wasn’t allowed to prepare any special dishes for the president, since he wanted to eat what the workers usually ate. So, for the long-awaited lunch—at which both Dad and Valdivino showed up—she managed to get a one hundred and eighty kilo boar.
JK seemed content to eat alongside the workers, struck up conversations with them, and joked around with one guy after another. When he shook hands with Dad, Dad reminded him of their encounter at Catetinho and his desire to contribute to the historical record of the construction of the city, Well, don’t miss the opportunity to cover the first scientific summit of Brasília, said the president, on August 6 we’re going to have a conference here with more than one hundred doctors from various states around the country—for Dad, these words seemed to confirm for him, once more, his status as official recorder.
I wasn’t there that day, and Dad didn’t write anything about their conversation in his notebooks. Even so, it’s possible, with what I’ve heard, with what Dad later told Aunt Francisca, with what Aunt Francisca later mentioned to me, and even with what Dad revealed to me, enclosed within four walls, to reconstitute the dialogues, as biographers and fiction writers sometimes do. As such, I wouldn’t be inventing anything if I were to say that, during that lunch, Dad told Valdivino that Bernardo Sayão had staked out the location, along the trail leading out to the Paranoá waterfall, of Brasília’s first chapel, the Don Bosco Hermitage—named for the saint who had prophesied the founding of the city—for that really was the main subject of conversation, If you want to keep bui
lding churches . . . I know you don’t believe in it, Sir, but religion is the first necessity of those who are going to arrive here, I will do everything I can, really, to work on the construction of this hermitage, because, as I told you, Sir, I mainly want to help with the building of churches; a new city needs churches, there’s nothing more important than churches, Valdivino repeated, and if the location was chosen by Mr. Bernardo Sayão, then the construction is blessed by God even as it begins.
I’ll say in passing that Valdivino certainly didn’t speak in that orderly a manner, nor did he just stick to this one subject, he zigzagged off into other conversations, asked silly questions, told stories about his life in Bahia, talked about Bernardo Sayão, and other subjects still, which I left out in order to simplify the reading and get right to the point. He recounted that his friend had found it necessary to leave the Eclectic City, for a reason that he would rather not mention, and that she was nowhere to be found, When my path becomes clearer, I’ll finish telling you my story, Mr. Moacyr, Sir, You said that to me once before and you’ve still never told me anything, replied Dad in a recriminatory tone of voice.
To tell the truth, I’m not sure if it was then or a few days later that Valdivino promised Dad that he’d one day tell him his story, what matters is that Dad replied that he was curious to hear it and on more than one occasion thereafter reminded Valdivino of the promise he’d made. Each time, Valdivino asked Dad to be patient and eventually even confessed to him, with his customary candor, that he could only be completely open with him once they became friends. We still need to get to know each other better, but it will happen one day, Mr. Moacyr, we’ll be great friends, Don’t you trust me, Valdivino? I don’t know if you’d understand me, Sir.
Valdivino looked out the window with the fixed stare of a drug addict, and then, as if he had suddenly woken up, explained that as long as he couldn’t find another job, he’d continue his work as a scribe in the Free City, he liked to put the things the migrant workers dictated to him on paper, letters of joy and sadness, of love, of sorrows, of longing, and of mourning, Put this, they’d say, and then they’d tell the story that they wanted transcribed, they send greetings or set a date for the family to be reunited. Valdivino took pleasure in helping to reconnect those family ties, since the Free City was being populated by separated families, especially men without women, children without parents, parents without children, and fiancés without their brides-to-be. In this function, he also discovered many indiscretions and secrets, Because of this I’ve realized that I’m not alone in the world, I’m not the only one who makes mistakes, because I make mistakes, too, but I know that God forgives me, yes, one day I’ll finish telling you my story, Sir.
