Free City

by João Almino

  He was surprised to see Valdivino, dressed in white, with a black bowtie, come up to greet him. He was working as a waiter there in the Brasília Palace. He’d heard about Dad’s trips from Aunt Francisca, wanted to know about his adventures in the jungle, and asked after Bernardo Sayão, Boy, what a good man, don’t you think?, I’ll never forget that he was the one who helped me when I first arrived here, who asked me to work on the construction of his house. He later mentioned that he’d brought his brother down from the Northeast, with whom he was living in a nearby village. The situation is dark in the Northeast, Mr. Moacyr, a lot of people are fleeing the drought, coming to Brasília from all over the place, by bus to Governador Valadares, then by train to Belo Horizonte, then on to Anápolis, or else by semi-truck through Paraopeba and Patos de Minas and São Gotardo and Paracatu, crossing the Paracatu River on a ferry, There are so many people coming here that they’ve started to restrict the entry of workers, said Miguel Andrade in agreement.

  It was so true, in fact, that, if I were interested in doing so, I would accept João Almino’s suggestion that I write and include here a dense Northeastern regionalist novel in which the watering holes are all dried up, the ground cracked, the plants turned gray, the rivers are highways made of sand, the carcasses of animals signal more deaths to come, and the migrants flee in caravans, bringing their dramas with them, in search of the promised land. We’ll talk more later, Valdivino, suggested Dad.

  Miguel had come to the hotel to confirm the details of the Huxleys’ return to the airport the next day, This time there’s not going to be any mix up. He had been charged with accompanying the group to Xingu in a Brazilian Air Force plane.

  I need to get a statement out of Huxley, Dad mentioned, I want to make a collection of comments about Brasília in a structured way, with the name of the visitor at the top of a note card, then a record of their first impressions of the city, and one day these collected statements will be in a museum, Seems like a magnificent idea to me, said Miguel, That’s why I’ve got to come here tomorrow and wait for you all to get back.

  Valdivino reappeared, balancing a serving tray on his hand. He then resumed the conversation, as if he had forgotten to say something, When I arrived with my brother, Mr. Moacyr, I got rid of my shack in the Free City, I thought it better to live here close to the Bananal Creek, in the Bananal Village, which we all call Amaury Village, but I’m worried that the village is going to get flooded, Why didn’t you look for housing in the workers’ camp?, asked Dad, Well, I had already stopped working construction, Mr. Moacyr, and, even when I was working construction at the Palace, as you know, only the engineers got houses in the camp, me and the other workers all lived in sheds, where there wouldn’t have been any room for my brother, and plus I like to be independent, living out at the Amaury Village, and working as a waiter, the only problem is that they say that around September of next year, in 1959, when they build the dam and stop up the waterfall to fill the lake, the village is going to get covered up by all the water, It sure is, affirmed Miguel Andrade—emphasizing his words with his index finger—the lake is going fill up and spill over its banks, it will spread out to five kilometers in width and forty kilometers in length, with a circumference of more than 100 kilometers—he was tracing circles on the table with his index finger—there will be around thirty-eight square kilometers of lake, and it will be thirty-five meters deep . . . But some are saying, like the famous thinker from Rio de Janeiro, Gustavo Corção, said Dad, interrupting, that the soil here is so dry that the lake will never fill up, the water will all get sucked up by the subsoil, and if that happens, you and your brother will be saved, Valdivino.

  When Valdivino went on his way with tray in hand, Miguel Andrade mentioned that the Amaury Village had been named after a Newcap employee called Amaury de Almeida. At the beginning of that year, 1958, with the arrival of so many people to Brasília, there were some twenty thousand people without a place to live, and so Amaury, whom Miguel Andrade knew well, managed to set up a camp for them on the lands that would later be flooded.

  Two men passed by in dark suits. I saw them when they arrived, said Dad, they’ve all come from São Paulo, No, there are also people from Rio and Belo Horizonte, seems like the actress Tônia Carrero is here, and there have been whispers about the possibility that another very elegant woman is here, by the name of Maria Lúcia Pedroso, who was recently seen at the president’s side in Rio.

  Huxley and his group came down for dinner. An older Italian waiter was serving them, Dad noted. The writer was now wearing a beige suit and a silk tie with Persian horses on it, which descended disproportionally far below his waist. From afar, Dad witnessed the gestures of Laura, Elizabeth, and Huxley himself, who seemed disturbed by all the noise, Why don’t you ask Huxley to write his comments now?, asked Miguel, No, he’s having dinner right now, and I don’t have a note card . . . it’ll be better closer to the end of his stay.

  After Miguel Andrade left, Dad tried to get into the ball, but was refused entry for lack of an invitation. So he returned to the bar, where three young women had arrived, who, judging by the cut of their long gowns and the quality of their makeup, were certainly among the night’s invited guests. He remained there observing them, working up the courage to strike up a conversation.

  Seeing Dad all by himself, Valdivino returned, I’m going to tell you something, Mr. Moacyr, I sold that shack in the Free City to pay down my debt, but the buyers were just some poor Northeasterners, just like me and the others, and they still owe me more than half, and what I did get from them I decided to give to the woman that I’ve already told you about, Sir, who is my ruin, it went to a work of divine inspiration, but I might have made a mistake, because she’s being difficult these days, complicated, and she didn’t like it one bit that I brought my brother down here. She demands things of me, Mr. Moacyr, I have to prove that I love her, but that proof is never enough, she’s always unsatisfied, it’s a woman thing, you know how it is, Sir, happy on the outside, sad on the inside, thinking that I don’t really love her, that no one loves her, lying on her bed, waiting for the world to end. Everything’s all well and good, it seems, and then all of a sudden it isn’t, the world is about to end, and then she lets loose crying, feeling a deep sorrow, she doesn’t let me come near her, demands that I do things for her, that I cook, take care of her, tidy up her room . . . I wouldn’t complain if she’d let me sleep with her, And why are you still with this woman, Valdivino, dump that crazy lady, I can’t, Mr. Moacyr, it’s just that you don’t know my whole story, Well tell me that story once and for all, man, I don’t care if I live in a house, not at all, Mr. Moacyr, if I could get a new construction job, I’d find some place to live outside of the Amaury Village, it’s just that I can’t manage to get one, I read all the signs on street corners, asking for bricklayers, laborers, carpenters, joiners, indicating the offices we should report to, I listen to all the announcements from the loudspeakers on the light-poles in parks and on top of cars, telling construction workers to report to the camps, I also see the announcements at the movie theater in the Free City, and it’s true that they need workers, the announcements even say how many they need, they advertise the firm and then the registration trucks arrive, but I don’t want to work on just anything, in any place, do you know, Sir, when they’re going to start building the cathedral?

  Dad drank one whiskey, then another, and another still, and worked up the courage to sit down at the table with the young women, who showed some curiosity about what he did for a living, and especially about life in the Free City. Dad pointed out Huxley to them. The three of them immediately took their menus, which had beef stroganoff at the top of the list, to be autographed by Huxley, and Laura as well. Then they went into the ball.

  The Huxleys’ dinner came to an end around eleven, and Huxley and his entire group went up to their bedrooms, but the ball was still going, and at midnight the loud music and lively conversations could still be heard.

  Dad
hadn’t stopped drinking whiskey and was now alone once again. He felt ill, a sensation of nausea, and had to go to the restroom. That’s where Valdivino found him, stretched out on the floor, You hardly ate anything, Mr. Moacyr, that’s why. Valdivino took care of him and offered to serve as his chauffeur that night, driving him back to the Free City.

  Dad didn’t explain to Valdivino that he no longer shared the house with us, nor did Aunt Francisca refuse to take him to his bedroom when he arrived with Valdivino, You don’t have a way to get back at this time of night, she said to Valdivino. So a second hammock was set up, and Valdivino slept in the living room with me. That night, Typhoon, who had already grown accustomed to spending the night in the backyard, whined so much at the backdoor that we had to let him in, and he ended up sleeping beneath Valdivino’s hammock.

  Early the next morning, a Sunday, Valdivino wanted to know how Dad was feeling, Just a bit of a hangover, but it’ll be gone soon. Then Valdivino went to the grocery store to get some boldo tea for Dad, and later he accompanied Aunt Francisca and me to Mass. When we returned, he wanted to see the macaws and the monkey, and he stayed out at the back of the house, talking reservedly with Dad, to whom he revealed one more secret about his mysterious friend, She likes me, she has always liked me—not only does she like me, she’s in love with me, the way I am with her—but there’s another guy who’s in love with her too, and she allows herself to be influenced by him; I don’t have the courage to complain about it, because she’s very strong willed, when her spirit revolts she knows no bounds, she doesn’t think twice about any danger, one second she’s calm, even overly calm, as if she’d been sleeping while still awake, but then her disposition just does an about-face, she becomes the complete opposite and is worse than a viper.

  Whenever Aunt Matilde and Aunt Francisca came near, Valdivino would change the subject, Mr. Moacyr, it’s like I told you, I want to get a new construction job and move out of Amaury Village, I can talk to Roberto, Aunt Matilde offered, if he could get you a job at the Congress building . . . I’d take it then and there, Dona Matilde, it’s not a church, but it might as well be, What?, don’t go thinking that it’s a house of God, no way, said Aunt Matilde, it’s very much the opposite, it’ll be more brothel than church, Don’t talk that way, Matilde, show some respect, objected Aunt Francisca, The quality of politics is going to go to the pits once Congress is transferred to the interior of Goiás, if it’s already bad in Rio, just imagine what it’ll be like here, insisted Aunt Matilde, What matters is that Valdivino find a good job, right, Valdivino?, said Aunt Francisca, with a maternal air.

  That night, when Dad went to the Brasília Palace to await the arrival of the Huxleys, Miguel Andrade, at the front of the group, announced, You’re not going to be able to talk to him, he’s exhausted, but there’s no need anyway, I got the statement that you wanted. They went up to the bar, where Miguel Andrade told Dad about his trip in the Air Force DC-3, We flew over the region of the lost City of Z, I’ve heard about that, said Dad, The one who really knew the story well was Antonio Callado, who had even written a book, called The Skeleton of the Green Lake, based on the expeditions made by Colonel Fawcett to discover Z, I met a woman who believes that that colonel died there last year, said Dad, That British explorer, Percy Harrison Fawcett, his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, and his son’s best friend, named Raleigh Rimell, continued Miguel, disappeared in 1925, when Colonel Fawcett, who had begun his search in 1906, made his eighth expedition to Brazil in search of the City of Z, the lost city of an ancient and advanced civilization, a story which inspired the novel The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle, a friend of Fawcett, But did you all see anything when you flew over that area?, asked Dad, Every once in a while, in the middle of the forest, we’d see some rocks that were in the shape of buildings and jagged or crumbling fortresses, and later, when we arrived at the Posto Capitão Vasconcelos, on a tributary of the Xingu River, to visit the Uialapiti tribe, we were received by Claudio Villas-Boas, who told us that his brother, Orlando, had found a pile of bones in 1952 in the Xingu region, which appeared to belong to Fawcett, and that he’d heard the Kalapalo confess to killing him, but according to Callado that was all disproven later on when Fawcett’s dentist examined the skeleton’s dental arch, and years after Fawcett’s disappearance there were people who swore that they’d seen him, a Swiss hunter spotted him out in the forest in 1931, and in 1937 an American missionary ran into Fawcett’s grandson, the son of Jack and an Indian woman, but look, Moacyr, I know that this is what you really want to see. It was Huxley’s statement on a piece of paper clipped onto a clipboard: “I came straight from Ouro Preto to Brasília. What a dramatic voyage across time and history! A journey from Yesterday to Tomorrow, from what has ended to what has yet to begin, from ancient accomplishments to new promises.”

  I did as you said, explained Miguel, up here at the top, as you can see, I printed, in capital letters, “Aldous Huxley,” and then I asked him what were his impressions of Brasília, told him he could write anything he liked, he was surprised, obviously he wasn’t expecting that, and I clarified that it was for a collection of statements from illustrious visitors, to be displayed in the future museum of Brasília, exactly as you had suggested. He took his pen out of his pocket right away, turned to the next page, and started to scribble, then scribble some more, he tore out one, two, three pages, then finally composed these sentences.

  Enthusiastic, the two of them agreed to take that statement to JK’s press committee early the next morning, it was Dad’s first triumph as the president’s note-taker, albeit an imperfect one, who had to resort to a third party.

  Two days later—I remember this well—Dad showed us, triumphantly, that the words that he’d helped obtain from Aldous Huxley appeared in all the newspapers, as if they were a telegram that JK had received from Huxley, I knew right away that it didn’t have the feel of a telegram, said Aunt Matilde.

  Less than a month had passed when Valdivino showed up in the doorway of our house, on a day when Aunt Francisca was taking care of me. I didn’t like being sick, but I have fond memories of my illnesses, for through those memories I can see how tenderly Aunt Francisca treated me. A wave of affection swept over me whenever I heard her footsteps, the door to the bedroom would open slowly and silently, and, from the other side, her sweet figure would appear, she came to check if I was running a fever or not, if I was feeling any pain, if I’d been able to sleep. I’d lie there waiting for her, looking up at the ceiling. I would wake up when the first light of the morning came in through the window and the cracks between the zinc roof-tiles, waiting for her to come see me, for I always felt better once I saw her. She would put a chair beside the bed and stay there, passing her small, delicate hands over my forehead, squeezing my hands, sometimes soaking a cloth in alcohol and wrapping it around my throat. She’d sit on the mattress, directing her loving eyes towards me, which tore me to pieces inside, and then, like a gentle welding torch, they would put my broken body back together. If I could have, I would have asked her to lie down beside me, I would have shrunk myself down and nestled on her lap, I would have gone back to being the small child that she had taken in when my parents died. And other times she’d bring her accordion and play a soft song—which produced waves of sweet emotion—to cheer me up. Then she’d carefully tuck me into the bed sheet and kiss me on the forehead.

  On that day I had chicken pox. There were blisters on my body and my face. Aunt Francisca, always by my side, suffered for me, and was touched, as if I were on my deathbed. She brought me hot soup that had been made especially for me and carefully brought the spoon, which caressed my lips—with just the right portion so that it wouldn’t spill on me—up to my mouth. She took me into the living room and gave me a present: a journal, where I could write whatever I wanted—and in which, though I didn’t know it then, I would later commit indiscretions that would cause her harm. The window brought me renewed and joyful light, a landscape filled with houses, and sounds from th
e streets, even the mud outside seemed new to me. I rested my head on Aunt Francisca’s lap, closing my eyes, and she would look down at me and we’d smile at each other, looking into each other’s eyes, her lips would come near my forehead, her long hair caressing my face, and she would sigh into my ear, telling me that I’d feel better soon, very soon. I had never loved anyone as much as I loved Aunt Francisca and I was frightened by the thought of losing her, of her running off with Valdivino, and Valdivino had come to spoil the harmony of that afternoon, I came out here to deposit my salary and I couldn’t leave without stopping by to thank Dona Matilde.

  The job, with the Pacheco Fernandes Dantas construction firm, really was on the construction of the Congress building, I receive my pay in cold hard cash, always on Sunday, and I come out here with some co-workers, who fill up on booze out at Maracangalha Bar, they even drink it in coffee mugs, but not me, I still don’t drink, or smoke, I don’t see the fun of it, I deposit almost all of it at the Caixa Savings Bank, That’s the way to do it, said Aunt Francisca. Dad, who at that point ate all his meals at our house, but still wasn’t sleeping there, asked him, How do you like the work? I can’t complain about the work, Mr. Moacyr, it’s really great, I like the Planalto Village, and I get room and board for free, but I have to share a room with a policeman from the SPB, one of the few who live there, I don’t know why he doesn’t move to the wooden barracks out in Oldcap, like all the other policemen, he’s a brawny, broad-shouldered guy, by the name of Aristotle, always wearing his yellow uniform. Typhoon snarled, which he rarely did. Valdivino said, You see?, Typhoon already understands it all, His name is Aristotle?, asked Aunt Matilde, I know it doesn’t fit him, but that’s his name all right, he’s from Paraíba, They reused the old Air Force uniforms to make the SPB uniforms, explained Dad.