by João Almino
I knew of the existence of Lucrécia and discovered the house where Dad took her. I used to look at Dad and Aunt Francisca on the couch in the living room, both of them sad and silent, Aunt Francisca knitting, concentrating on the movement of the needles, and Dad reading his newspapers or else leaning his head back and closing his eyes. I always saw them like that, and it never crossed my mind that something might be going on between the two of them, not between him and Aunt Francisca, Aunt Francisca was no Lucrécia. That’s why it was so shocking when, one day, I arrived home from school and saw—through a crack in the bedroom door—Dad on top of Aunt Francisca, her struggling at the edge of the bed, still dressed, with her thighs spread open, him stumbling around afterwards, his breath smelling of alcohol, kicking the door open right into my face.
I thought that I should protect her by telling what not only I, but all the neighborhood kids knew, that Dad met up with Lucrécia in that house on the other side of town, and the sense of power was stronger than the regret I felt when, to my relief, Aunt Francisca definitively broke things off with Dad after an enormous argument, the reasons for which I didn’t understand completely, but certainly Lucrécia must have been behind those motives that weren’t quite clear to me.
From what Dad told me within four walls, I suppose that, if he wasn’t kicked out, he at least felt as if he’d been kicked out of the house, and so he went to find Lucrécia, he wanted her to move definitively to the house where they had their rendezvous, but she seemed different, distant, receiving his visit as if she were a psychologist in her office, attempting to analyze him, explain his behavior, and, refusing his pleas, telling him that no, she wasn’t the woman who was waiting for him. Devastated, Dad didn’t give up, he spotted a ray of hope when she said, Let’s spend a week apart, then come get me one night, I want to know if you love me, because I feel like you don’t really love me, like you just want a woman who will keep you company at times like these.
He came to get her, took her to the house that he’d built for their trysts, and, under the faint light from the gas lamp, Lucrécia’s body grew larger as she took her clothes off layer-by-layer, her breasts swelled, her buttocks were like two great arches, still firm and nicely-shaped, Dad felt fragile in front of that majestic flesh, but Lucrécia knew how to rekindle his desire, and he gave himself over to the heat of her body and her skillful fingers and lips, and moments later he was gliding inside her, exploring and abusing the possibilities of that body in all its furrows with complete freedom, the way she arched her back and swayed her hips and the flexibility of her joints made it seem as if she’d gone mad, the spring mattress never stopped shaking, whack whack whack, impacts of desire hammering away at that body, harder, ever harder, and faster, tender filth spoken in whispered, vulgar words, which further aroused Lucrécia’s mouth, hands, and thighs, between which flowed a slippery pleasure, and he wanted to squeeze her, fuse his body to hers, all other bodies were contained in hers, Aunt Francisca’s, Mr. Ferreira’s daughter’s, and he powerfully hammered away at all of them at once, heedlessly and without fear of injuring her, he sunk his fingernails into her until her bounteous flesh began to bleed, he sucked hungrily at her breasts, bit her nipples, she screamed, screamed louder, he figured that all of the Free City could hear them, but they didn’t care, he was sweating, disoriented, lost, broken, almost unconscious on the bed.
That night Lucrécia opened up to him, about how she’d been raped as a little girl, how she ran away from her home in the sertão region of Bahia to end up in a red-light district in the capital city, Salvador, how she had given up that life and now only made dates with him, and Dad replied that he wanted her forever, that she should move into the house, that they’d be happy.
Those big belly laughs of Lucrécia, those crying outbreaks, none of those took place that night. Dad thought that he had finally found serenity in his relationship with Lucrécia, that tranquility was possible in the love between people who were merely lovers, that below the turbulent waves of passion there lay waters that were denser and deeper, wherein the heart could still beat, We have a little place of our own here, I want to be here with you everyday.
It was a Tuesday, and he didn’t see Lucrécia again the whole week. Dad looked everywhere for her, in Placa da Mercedes, in the little house that Paulão had bought for her . . . He walked along the avenues, hoping to come upon her the way he had before, going from one side of the city to the other, and spent a number of nights waiting for her in vain, alone, in the house that he had planned to share with her.
One fine day, Paulão brought him a note from Lucrécia and the news that she had gone back to Bahia, of her own accord. The note simply said, I don’t deserve you.
Dad felt as if the ground beneath his feet had been pulled out from under him and that he might suddenly fall into an abyss. Wandering the avenues, he no longer looked like the superior man that he had been before. Paulão had perhaps been the one responsible for Lucrécia’s departure, and it was possible that she hadn’t even left, Dad didn’t trust him, he thought that he should dissolve his partnership with him, but he feared that his own business ventures would deteriorate. He suffered from insomnia, and in his sleepless nights Aunt Francisca appeared to him as his salvation.
To the devil with you, Mister, Aunt Francisca told him when he tried to come back, What do you think I am, you think you can come sniffing after me just because some hussy abandoned you, everyone in town knows about that, And Francisca was completely right, Dad confessed to me between those four walls.
What sustained Dad during that difficult time—or so I deduced from what he told me on that fifth night—was his dream of greatness, a dream that had one side planted on the ground and the other elevated in the air, and if the ground happened to become unstable and no longer supported him, well, he’d fly, he would get back to his first and foremost mission there in the Central Plateau, the door that Bernardo Sayão had opened for him back in those very early days. He hadn’t been able to accompany visitors as he would have liked, not even Júlia Kubitschek, a teacher and the mother of the president, who was to arrive that January, in 1958, but when he found out that Sayão had just been asked by the president to build the Belém-Brasília highway, he offered to accompany him for the start of the work, and not only because he was in need of a spiritual retreat. He missed Sayão’s high spirits, his constant activity, and Dad knew that he was the right person for that undertaking, since he was the one who had made, back in 1949, the first sketches for the highway that would connect Anápolis to Belém, in the state of Pará, and he also knew that the president, according to what people were saying, chose Sayão for impossible tasks because he considered him naturally good and instinctually courageous. He had listened with admiration to the account of a conversation between the president and Sayão, Let’s tear down this jungle and unite the country from north to south, JK is to have said, This is the happiest day of my life, after I build this highway I can die, Sayão is said to have replied, and he even repeated, On the day that the highway is finished, I can depart forever, for I will have given my best effort to our cause. Like Sayão, Dad also had a liking for great challenges and danger, he would swim across rivers with him, like Sayão he would drive tractors at the edge of a cliff, with him he would make hedgehopping inspection flights above the jungle in his single-engine plane, and would tame the wild forests at some point along the 2,240 kilometer trajectory of the highway that would connect Brasília to Belém, in the state of Pará, a thruway that would make up part of the Trans-Brazilian Highway, which started in Santana do Livramento, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Dad asked to accompany Sayão on the construction of the highway, not because he wanted to usher in progress, bring about agrarian reform, or colonize the interior with agricultural settlements, as Sayão did, but because he wanted to record the endeavor for history, and he arrived in time to witness Sayão set up his trailer near Porangatu underneath an enormous pequi tree, light a campfire, and put some wooden boxes
out front as a place to receive visitors.
A reader of this blog asked me, along these lines, if it is true that Dad accompanied Sayão on the day when his single-engine plane lost altitude after taking off and got stuck in a treetop. Dad said that he had and told the story often, adding the detail that he and Sayão easily shimmied down the trunk of the tree, and that, once on the ground, Sayão merely inquired, unconcernedly, How am I going to get that damned thing down from those branches? I have no doubt, however, that herein is revealed my Dad’s mythomaniacal side, and that the true source of this story was JK, in one of his books, in which I found the same version of the story.
I’m not going to narrate in detail the three short trips that Dad made into the jungle, because it would take me too far away from the Free City, as well as from Lucrécia, Valdivino, Aunt Matilde, and Aunt Francisca, the main characters, without whom this narrative could not proceed. Nor do I intend to analyze Dad’s feelings as he went into the forest, or count his heartbeats as he encountered wild animals in the foggy night, ever lamenting the falling-out he’d had with Aunt Francisca and thinking of how much he missed Lucrécia. Suffice it to say, for now, it felt good for him to meet up with Sayão again and be a witness to one more important creation: the birth of the highway that would cut the map of Brazil from north to south like a sword. He had always liked geography, and geography itself was out there in the density of the forests and abundance of rivers, but, more precisely, the geography of the country was being redrawn out there. He had always admired the great conquests that he read about in history books, and the highway was no less a feat than any of them, not even those of Alexander the Great. That was what really moved him, and what even allowed him, after a few weeks, to forget about Lucrécia and Aunt Francisca. Those who first met him out in the jungle—like the blog-reader who, up to this point, is the only one who identified himself as being a native of Ceres—got the impression that he was a taciturn, circumspect man, a man of few words, but with enough courage to confront the jungle, without fear of mosquitoes or snakes. He felt that he was doing something fulfilling and carrying out a mission as true as Valdivino’s, a double mission, because if Valdivino had the sole mission of building churches, Dad had two: bear witness to those beginnings and record them for history, and get rich with the opportunities that presented themselves—he told me that very thing between four walls. He had gone through many difficulties, life hadn’t been easy for him, but a highway was now opening up for him, a highway for his life, one that was long, but true, just like the Belém-Brasília. Pain and satisfaction, fear, shock, and attraction to the unknown were all mixed together in his conscience, and this admixture was provided to him by the forest; the atmosphere that was enveloping him completely, affecting both his mood and emotional state, was the atmosphere of the forest itself.
I didn’t know whether Dad would ever come back home or if, upon returning from the jungle, he would go on living in that other house. If you want, you can go live there with him, Aunt Matilde told me one day, or you can live in both houses and spend one day here and the next over there. It rained a lot in the Free City, and Aunt Matilde reminded me that it was probably raining much more out in the forest. How could the thunder and lightening be any bigger than they already were? How could there be more rain than all that rain that was beating down on us? I imagined enormous running faucets in the sky above the jungle, above Dad and Bernardo Sayão, and the two of them having to escape from all that water in canoes. The days were drawing out, gladdened here and there by frequent visits from Valdivino and Roberto. Aunt Francisca had long conversations with Valdivino, even longer than when Dad used to be there, Valdivino lamenting the fact that he hadn’t gone into the forest with Dad, since he wished to meet up with Bernardo Sayão again and missed Dad.
Both Aunt Matilde and Aunt Francisca started to have more to talk about after Dad left, or perhaps it was Roberto and Valdivino who became more inspired. I do know that the conversations lasted longer, and that I didn’t always manage to hear them as well as I wanted. Sometimes, even in the rain, Aunt Matilde would go out with Roberto, with no set time to come back home. When they went out on foot, with umbrella in hand, I would follow them from afar, watching the movements of their bodies, their embraces and kisses. The city had its own smell, the smell of damp earth after the heat of the day, a fresh smell, of the wood of the houses, of the foliage of the shrubs. It’s better like this, this way the house doesn’t get so dusty, Aunt Francisca would say. But when the rains came, Aunt Francisca—if she wasn’t working, that is, since she still held the position of caterer at the SWAS restaurant—became a prisoner of the house. I’d often see her figure fixed in the window, or else she’d spend hours on the accordion or with her crochet, displaying her great skill with the needles. Sometimes we’d go out with an umbrella to do the shopping, and I’d accompany her along the avenues, keeping us clear of the enormous puddles and the mud that was splattered by passing cars. We’d come back home satisfied with our little adventures, clean off our shoes when we arrived, and Aunt Francisca would make me a snack while we discussed what we’d seen out in the streets and shops.
Aunt Francisca paid close attention to the sunsets whenever the rain let up and would point out to me all the colors that filled the sky, as if she had painted them herself. At night she’d sit down with her accordion, and I would silently listen to her, sometimes her only spectator, other times with some of my friends, who also listened with awe as she played, considering her to be a great musician and putting off the intelligence and humor of our conversations until later.
Unlike Aunt Matilde, Aunt Francisca never raised her voice. Her politeness and good manners had been with her from the crib on, it was something that came natural to her, that didn’t seem to have been learned, that didn’t arise from rules, but rather from her temperament alone. She didn’t think she was better than other people, nor did she have the pretence of originality. She was conventional in the way she dressed, thought, and spoke, which, at the time, seemed to me like lofty qualities—the opposite of what I later came to believe. If she suffered, she suffered silently and extracted lessons and wisdom from her suffering. If the incident with Dad had troubled her or even devastated her, she didn’t show it. I saw her as a beautiful crystal vase that had shattered, but whose pieces were put back together in their rightful places in such a way that the fissures couldn’t be seen, and, yet, in spite of that, all you had to do was shine a little light on the crystal to realize that it was in a fragile state.
She was not as extroverted as Aunt Matilde, who seemed only to live through her relationships with the radio and with other people. I won’t go as far as to say that Aunt Matilde was superficial, dissolute, or that she lacked firm principles, since just because a surface is full of colors doesn’t mean that that’s all there is to it, and also because I’m not going to restrict what I write to the mere perceptions of the child I was: I gradually came to understand Aunt Matilde’s nonconformism and, from my point of view today, even when applied to the past, I am incapable of painting her portrait in dark tones.
When he returned from the forest, Dad would sometimes come to see me and ask after Aunt Francisca. I don’t want to see him, not even from afar, not while he’s still conducting business with Paulão, she said to Aunt Matilde one day. But when I’d catch her at the window or lost in thought, or even playing solitaire with a deck of cards, I imagined that it was because she missed Dad, and I began to feel guilty for telling her about Dad’s second house.
On his next trip out to the jungle, at the end of May, Dad helped open up a small clearing, where they built a little shelter next to a tiny cassava patch, which had been planted by farmhands from the Northeast, and a well, where they could get drinking water and rinse off using a hollow gourd. Dad felt suffocated by the trees around the shelter, but this time he worked up the courage to go out into the jungle, taking footpaths that the highway workers had blazed, accompanied by one of their number, a guy fr
om Ceará who already knew those woods well. Dad noted that sometimes there were enormous tree trunks blocking the paths. They toppled over right there, dead, and remained there, to be consumed by time, yet tufts of green were already emerging from them, life in constant renewal.
Was there some order in that chaos of trunks and leaves, with such varying distance from one to the next and so many different species? The trees were gathered there like confused giants, on whose legs hung parasites and webs of branches, like curtains that filtered the already weakened light through layers of leaves. The sun could barely be detected, hidden behind those lush, green structures.
If the trees of the Central Plain only knew the rainy season and the dry season, the trees in that forest, permanently covered in their verdant vestments, knew nothing of the desert or the dry season, nor even of the changing seasons. Beneath the carpet of dead leaves, down where the snakes slithered about, the green extended over the ground and out to every side, dense and vibrant, in stark contrast to the dryness of the savannah, to which Dad had already become accustomed.
They had to be on the lookout for snakes. When he saw his first one, Dad thought about Valdivino, but the one we’d seen on our hunt near the Descoberto seemed harmless compared to the ones they came across in great number out there in the jungle, twisted around branches like rings or curling up in the leaves, compared with the deadly bushmaster or the giant sucuri, the “great snake” that Colonel Fawcett had killed, the one that Lucrécia had described as having magic powers, and which, as Dad came to learn out there, could swallow a man, squeezing him and crushing his bones to dust before eating him piecemeal. As he hiked, he always kept in mind the possibility that he would be forced to take an antidotal serum or simply burn the location of the bite without remorse.
