Free City

by João Almino

  If in the Central Plateau he felt abandoned by the vast horizons, out there he thought himself crushed by their absence. Instead of getting lost in a boundless nothingness, his range of vision only reached the vines, which served as a trampoline for capuchin monkeys and woolly monkeys. On a rare occasion, the light would appear on high, filtered by leaves and branches, vaporously projected on the trunks of the trees, giving life to the colors of the orchids and butterflies. On a rare occasion, a majestic palm tree would reveal its clusters of açaí. We have to be careful not to catch the chagas disease, the barbeiro bug lives here in these branches, said Dad’s companion, taking all the lyricism out of that poetry. Then came insects in great quantity, hordes of mosquitoes ready to attack. Dad was bit by a midge. If it’s not chagas, it’ll be malaria, he thought. Caravans of ants cut leaves and carried them single-file to their ant mounds in incessant toil, like the workers of the Belém-Brasília.

  He had always felt at ease with geography, his favorite subject in school, he’d studied rivers and their watersheds, forests, memorizing the names of their fauna and flora, and traveled all over the surface of the Earth in his imagination, but nothing that he had imagined compared with what he saw in the forest in reality, which surpassed all intuition or knowledge.

  Nobody here has enough memory to store that many names of trees, fruits, and animals, said the guy from Ceará. They saw a giant anteater and coati, Don’t you like to hunt, Sir?, because out here there’s no end of things to hunt, there are tapir, paca, agouti, deer, and armadillo, you just have to watch out for the jaguars. Dad recalled the first time that we laid eyes on Valdivino. Could it be true that he’d saved us, that he’d scared off a jaguar? Jaguars are dangerous when they’re with their cubs or in heat, going around with the male at their side, said Dad, as if he were a specialist on the subject, remembering what Valdivino had explained to him, Ah, so you already know about it, right?

  Dad couldn’t stay away from his business interests for a long time and didn’t want to miss the inauguration of the Palace of the Dawn, at which hundreds of illustrious visitors would convene.

  When he got back from his trip to the jungle, I noticed that something started to happen again, I guess distance serves to separate those who aren’t destined to stay together and, in other cases, brings those who can’t stay apart back together again. Thus it was that Aunt Francisca didn’t refuse Dad’s visits this time, she even served him sweets that couldn’t have been prepared the night before just by chance, and she didn’t object to him leaving a pair of macaws and a monkey in our backyard, with the condition that he wouldn’t just abandon them there and that he’d stop by every day to take care of them.

  A day before the inauguration of the Palace, Dad managed to get into the lobby of the Tourism Hotel, where JK was listening to the championship game of the World Cup on the radio. I’ll never forget that day, June 29, 1958, when Brazil became the world champion for the first time, beating Sweden 5-2. I remember the broadcasters calling each goal and each firework that went off, at which Typhoon barked endlessly. I remember the dribbles and passes of the players, of Garrincha, Didi, Pelé, Vavá, I remember Gilmar’s defensive stops, which I visualized through the lively descriptions of the radio announcer. On the radio, the game always seemed faster and more chock-full of dribbling than any game seen in person.

  The next day, Dad got his hands on a copy of the telegram from the president to the new champions and soon copied it onto the first page of one of his notebooks:

  It was with deep emotion that we received, in Brasília, where we just finished listening to the dazzling performance of the Brazilian team, the great news of the victory, which was anxiously hoped for. I would like to confess the joy that at this moment is sweeping across the entire nation . . . Please accept the warmest congratulations from the president of Brazil and send our greetings to the valiant Swedes, who conducted themselves with such gallantry and hospitality.

  Remember this date, João, Dad told me, and not because of the World Cup, but because of all this that’s being inaugurated in Brasília, and then he mentioned the Avenue of Nations, the Monumental Axis Highway, the Brasília Palace Hotel, which had already accommodated President Stroessner on May 2, as well as the paved highway from Brasília to Anápolis, whose construction Dad had hoped to accompany, not as an engineer, nor as a doctor, but as a note-taker, at the side of Bernardo Sayão. And there was also going to be the first transfer of diplomatic credentials, to the Portuguese ambassador. The date should be remembered chiefly because of the Palace of the Dawn, the only large building, together with the Brasília Palace Hotel, that had already been completed, a building that should have been finished in March, but which was going to be inaugurated on the day after the World Cup victory, that is, on June 30, 1958.

  Years later, in 1966, when I left home on bad terms with Dad because of the stories I’d heard about him and Valdivino, because Aunt Francisca didn’t want to believe me, or even because I had taken after Aunt Matilde in my political affinities, in opposition to the rest of the house, I recalled what Dad had said about the Palace as I read a sentence from Toynbee: “The creation of Brasília is an act of human affirmation that constitutes an event in the history of humanity . . . The Palace of the Dawn broke with all of the traditional columns of the last five thousand years.”

  Aunt Matilde was critical of all those inaugurations, I’m growing more and more convinced that this Brasília project is useless, a brutal waste of money, Then why did you move here?, Aunt Francisca would ask, Just for the money, look, I won’t deny it, but this is certainly a waste of resources in such a poor country, and on top of that they’re building everything out of the most expensive stuff they can find; just imagine how many hospitals and schools they could build with the money that was poured into that Palace of the Dawn, the capital should really just stay in Rio.

  As a result of these opinions, Aunt Matilde had some quarrels with Roberto, and also disagreed with him about the choice of the new Treasury Minister, although they agreed in their criticism of the previous one. It’s been twenty-eight months since the president appointed this José Maria Alkmin as Treasury Minister, and the economy has gone from bad to worse, she said, I agree with that, it’s fiscal chaos, the deficit has increased on the balance sheets, he said, strengthening her argument, It’s a disaster, concluded Aunt Matilde, And another thing, said Dad, joining the conversation, a dollar used to be worth seventy cruzeiros, now it’s worth a hundred and forty-seven, But with the appointment of Lucas Lopes, things are going to change, asserted Roberto, he believes in foreign investment to increase revenues, the country needs industrialization and development, then the automobile industry will arrive here, He sold himself to foreign monopolies, that part’s true, said Aunt Matilde in disagreement, he should be strengthening domestic industries, not bringing foreign capital into the country.

  Aunt Francisca sometimes listened to these arguments and would get so upset about the disagreements that she’d use any pretext, skillfully deviating the conversation, to achieve harmony among them all on the topic of how the dessert tasted or the beauty of the full moon or even the possibility that it would rain the next day.

  Closed in between four walls, on that fifth night, Dad told me that he hadn’t been able to get invited to the inauguration of the Palace of the Dawn, but that days later the president had some friends over, including the small group surrounding Niemeyer, and Roberto, who was connected to that group, extended invitations to Dad and Aunt Matilde. The blog-reader who had previously insisted that I include a few more names and dates has now informed me, citing well-known sources, that Milton Prates, as well as Rochinha and Juca Chaves—who were frequent guests of the president—would certainly have figured among those present, in addition to Dilermando Reis, who brought his guitar to the Palace and played his old waltzes, Bené Nunes, who performed his melodies on the piano, and César Prates, who intoned sentimental songs. I’m not certain about this, and I recommend that
the reader who is interested in this type of detail consult those well-known sources.

  In that relaxed atmosphere, in which JK even danced a samba to the rhythms of guitar and piano, Dad once more spoke to him about the notebooks he was working on so that they might serve as a source for the history of the construction of Brasília, And, if you prefer, Sir, even as a source for your Golden Book, and then he told the president that, during that very month of July in 1958, when the writer John Dos Passos—who had written about Bernardo Sayão in 1948 for Life Magazine—came back to Brazil and was searching in vain for him in Brasília, he, Dad, had been one of the sources that passed along new facts to Dos Passos about the expeditions of that modern pioneer into the Amazonian jungle. And then JK promised him, I’m going to request that you join my press committee this August, during the visits of José Mora, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, and also a legation of members of the Japanese parliament.

  Come August, seeing as no one ever came to get him, Dad resolved to introduce himself to the press committee, and by chance he ran into an acquaintance there, Miguel Andrade, from Minas Gerais, a short, skinny old man, with big ears and sad eyes. Since the chair of the committee wasn’t there, he settled for telling an advisor to the advisor to the committee chair that he had come at the recommendation of the president himself. No, there was no record of the president proposing that he accompany any of the visiting authorities, and some of the visits that Dad mentioned had already taken place. Miguel Andrade then mentioned to Dad that he had been put in charge of picking up the poet Elizabeth Bishop from the airport, but that he’d failed to meet up with her, But tomorrow the writer Aldous Huxley is going to arrive here with a number of other people, and they’re all going to stay at the Brasília Palace Hotel.

  It was an opportunity sent straight from heaven. Around noon on Saturday on August 16, 1958, a date recorded in one of the “Onward” notebooks, a hot, clear day during the dry season, Dad witnessed the arrival, at the Brasília Palace Hotel, of a number of cars carrying more than forty men and women, and the lobby of the hotel, which had been deserted up to that point, was filled with laughter and conversation, with women in sack dresses of the latest fashion and men in dark pinstripe suits, who had all come in on a chartered flight from São Paulo, invited guests for one of the almost weekly banquets and balls thrown by the president for groups from Rio, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, and other cities. The president was also set to arrive for the party, someone mentioned to Dad—one of the two hundred and twenty-five trips he would make to Brasília in 1957 and 1958, almost ten a month, first in a DC-3, then in the spacious, comfortable four-engine Viscount.

  Ten minutes after the group from São Paulo, Huxley arrived. Elegantly tall and slender, so white he was almost yellow, in a white sport coat that contrasted with the dark suits and ties that the Paulistas were wearing for the winter in Brasília, he was accompanied by his Italian wife, Laura. Short and blonde, with greenish-gray eyes, a Polaroid camera slung over her shoulder, and nicely made-up, she looked to be much younger than him and, in fact, Dad later found out that she was twenty years younger. They were later joined by the writer Antonio Callado, the Polish-Brazilian architect Maya Osser, an employee from the Ministry of External Relations, and, soon after the others arrived, the poet Elizabeth Bishop.

  Dad wondered whether he should introduce himself right away, but when he learned from the Ministry employee that they were going to visit the Palace of the Dawn after lunch, he stuck around to accompany them. The Huxleys and writer Antonio Callado left in the Lincoln convertible that the president had made available for illustrious visitors.

  Identifying himself as a member of the president’s press committee, Dad was able to climb aboard the cream-colored minibus that had come to take the rest of the group, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, but a guard at the entrance to the Palace consulted a list and refused them all entry. They had to go back to the hotel to sort out the confusion, before being driven back to the Palace. Dad preferred to wait for them at the hotel, for he knew that his name still wouldn’t be on the list of people authorized for entry.

  It was the first time that he’d explored the interior of the Brasília Palace Hotel. If instead of Dad, Roberto had been there, I would certainly have to include here a detailed description of the Palace of the Dawn, but Dad only glimpsed it from one angle, and from afar, and, therefore, I don’t need to jot down anything more than his perception of the play of light and shadow on the bold, white shapes, intensified by the afternoon sun, and of the columns that he so admired. At the back of the Brasília Palace Hotel, there was space for a still nonexistent garden, bordered by some shoddy buildings used by the hotel employees. Dad went up to the dining room, at the end of which one could see an enormous swimming pool, which was still empty at the time; a photograph of that pool was sent to me by a blog-reader and serves to help me complement Dad’s memory with details about its oval shape and blue tiles. On the same floor, behind a black wall, there was a bar and a lobby, where noisy background music could be heard.

  By chance, Dad ran into the Countess Tarnowska there, as well as her beautiful dark-eyed daughter, who was in blue jeans and a khaki shirt. The countess, with a straw hat on her head and white scarf wrapped around her neck, was also wearing blue jeans. They talked about the fires in the Free City. A day earlier, a bank next to the countess’s movie theater had caught fire. She’d been scared at first, but fortunately the fire hadn’t spread. I went there to see And God Created Woman, with Brigitte Bardot, said Dad, to which the countess replied, Picture this, one day during a showing of that movie, when it got to the nude scene, Brigitte had barely unbuttoned a button when the projectionist stopped the film and announced: We request that women and young ladies please leave and wait outside. That’s the way it is, only men can look at naked women in the Free City, joked Dad.

  The Huxleys and their entourage finally returned from the Palace of the Dawn. One of them mentioned that they’d seen the magnolia tree, still just a meter tall, that Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, had recently planted in the gardens in front of the Palace.

  Happy and charming, the countess greeted Maya—the young Polish woman—effusively, spoke to everyone else in English that sounded perfect to Dad—who could barely make himself understood in that tongue, which all the others there had mastered—and later invited the whole group out for a drink at her hotel, the Santos Dumont, in the Free City. Why don’t you come along, too?, she said to Dad.

  It was starting to get dark when they arrived in the Free City. Since he’d only seen it from the outside, Dad had never taken notice of how elegant the Santos Dumont Hotel was. It was a short building, like so many others in the Free City, with metal chairs along the narrow cement entryway, but its interior elegance filled with joy the eyes of those who entered. This looks like a Greenwich Village bar, said Elizabeth Bishop, referring to the ample, ten meter-wide room, with a bamboo bar, vibrant, fresh colors, scarlet red tablecloths on the tables, black chairs, and red and green frames around the windows, and atop the hi-fi, which was playing classical music, records by Villa-Lobos, Stravinsky, and Bartok.

  Tables were pushed together. Countess Tarnowksa, who had arrived a little earlier and had quickly bathed, appeared in a patterned Indian dress with a rolled-up bandana around her neck, offered us whisky sours and orange juice, and introduced us to a Polish guest, who was stout and blonde, My daughter and I went hunting with him, the trip lasted three weeks, Where did you go?, asked Huxley, To the west of here. Then Dad said, I go hunting sometimes, too, out to the São Bartolomeu and near the Descoberto, Oh, no, we went much further out, we wanted to hunt jaguars, but we ended up getting deer, it was the first time my daughter had ever been hunting, and she also managed to kill a dozen caimans, we just adore living in this place, you know? I was out in the middle of the jungle with Bernado Sayão, but that place is frightening, I still
haven’t built up the courage to hunt out there, said Dad, Are there snakes around here?, Elizabeth Bishop wanted to know, They’ve seen two-headed snakes in Feia Lake, and even boa constrictors, but anacondas are only commonly found out by the Samambaia and São Bartolomeu rivers, Dad informed them.

  Later, they walked through the Free City and went into a narrow, empty bar, where a lone customer was drinking beer, I’ve never been to this one, said Dad. Dad related these details to me, enclosed within four walls, but I, too, vaguely remember those figures that arrived there, because I lingered in the entryway of that bar until Dad told me to go back home. All of them took notice of the young woman with Renaissance features, bleach-blonde hair, and an audaciously low-cut black sweater, sulking in a corner of the room. She looks like a mermaid coming out of her grotto, said Elizabeth Bishop.

  Near her, on the counter, two little rosy-cheeked children looked at the group with curiosity, and every now and then the young woman’s husband took a look around the room, sticking his head out between the flowery curtains, as Elizabeth Bishop pointed out. The young woman didn’t speak English, but she could stammer out some French. She was the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she said. Aimez-vous vivre ici? Laura Huxley asked her, Je le déteste! Mais mon mari, oui, il l’aime bien. They were both from São Paulo, the husband had adapted to life out there, but she was dying of longing for her hometown.

  On the way back to the Brasília Palace Hotel, Dad, who had caught a ride with the group, asked: So what do you all think of Brasília? It reminds me of those depressing landscapes around Madrid, replied Elizabeth Bishop—mentioning that it wasn’t her opinion alone, but that other members of the group thought the same—and doesn’t it seem ironic that the first buildings to be constructed are palaces, while those that belong to the workers are these temporary wooden houses?

  Not wanting to seem like an interloper, Dad left the group while they had dinner, but remained in the hotel, where he ran into Miguel Andrade and invited him for a drink at the bar, where some of JK’s invited guests were also milling around.