Free City

by João Almino

  Íris?

  Íris Quelemém, said Valdivino.

  Íris, who was also Lucrécia, encouraged those present to make public confessions. One had been a thief, he regretted what he had done, had lost everything during his years in prison, especially his friends. He was starting over from scratch. His family had gone without basic necessities. Now his children were all grown and no longer lived at home. His wife had agreed to come with him to the Garden of Salvation.

  Valdivino said, Nearly everyone here has committed terrible crimes, they’re former drug addicts, repentant murderers, and there are also former prostitutes, who are starting a new life here.

  Íris raised her voice, using a megaphone:

  The hopeless people of the world shall find their path here in the Garden of Salvation. Our teachings are inscribed through suffering and injustice—she placed emphasis on certain words and punctuated sentences with gestures of her hands, like an orchestra conductor. It was known from our birth that we were going to sin. So much so that Jesus was crucified to atone for our sins. But all of thine imperfections can be transformed into virtues. Thine errors shall guide ye on the path of light and the creation of a new humanity. They shall be like traffic signs, said Íris, raising up both arms and pointing them forward. Ye shall derive strength from your difficulties. Look the devils that appear before ye late at night straight in the eyes. I wish to teach ye how to transform them into guardian angels. Vice exists so that virtue may prevail. Believe in this blue sky, in the birds that are singing all around us. Love one another. Love each other truly, without envy or jealousy.

  Thus spoke Íris, at the top of Battle Hill, and Dad, who could barely believe his eyes, took note of her words and concluded—in thoughts that seemed sharp and crystalline—that the Garden of Salvation was a portal to the contribution that extremists, fanatics, madmen, lunatics, the depressed, the hopeless, and the misunderstood could give to the world. There they acquired relevance. There they discovered their mission. Brasília was a refuge from hopelessness, from Dad’s own hopelessness, which, though repressed and forgotten ever since he had left Rio de Janeiro to live in Ceres with Aunt Francisca, seemed to be reappearing. A feeling of distress began to gnaw at his stomach and rose up into his mouth with a bitter taste. Was the liquid he had drunk clouding his vision? No, that woman was truly Lucrécia, he recognized the look in her eye, which penetrated his mind, and her voice, which echoed in his ears.

  Dad attempted to resist that avalanche of madness. He couldn’t bring himself to believe in what Lucrécia was saying, although he was astonished at her knowledge, which must have come from a combination of readings and pure intuition. The words of a foreign journalist, which he had read a year or so earlier, were resounding in his head: “Brasília is something that surpasses all that can be imagined, something that would have shocked even Jules Verne, if someone were to have told him about it.” The reason for such amazement wasn’t the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer or Lúcio Costa’s design for the layout of the city, but rather the creeds and sects that were already proliferating on the outskirts of the city, and the possibility that Lucrécia, a prostitute, had become a prophetess.

  It’s all written in the stars, and the future of the human race is already mapped out, said Íris.

  It was that liquid that made the words spoken by Íris, who was also Lucrécia, resonate in the depths of Dad’s thoughts, but he believed in the freedom to determine one’s own destiny, and Brasília was a place of freedom, a place where it was possible to invent, experiment, and create something out of nothing, out of emptiness, out of the useless, the unnecessary—perhaps this was what his sister Matilde had been trying to express. All around him he saw the lawful and unlawful enrichment of so many people who benefitted from the construction business . . . He would control his own future, he would cut himself an ever-larger slice of the money that was being printed, he would be powerful, a millionaire, that was his goal.

  Ye shall never be free, no one shall ever be free, said Íris. If it’s money that attracts ye, by money ye shall be led.

  Dad became frightened, he thought that she was reading his thoughts and, for a fraction of a second, that she was right, that he’d lost all his freedom when Paulão had shown him the easy way to make money. From that point on, he had been swallowed up into a pit of blackened gold, transported to the heavens and the bottom of the pit all at once, as if he had cheated his way into heaven and remained there in a fragile state of comfort, awaiting his downfall. It was as if Lucrécia was speaking to him and no one else, but it was another Lucrécia, it was Íris, and she truly seemed to be a saint.

  It had rained the day before, and Dad could feel his feet getting mired in the mud, he noticed the expansive ground, the mirrors of water that reflected the blue sky above, the wide landscape bathed in red by the sun, and glimpsed from afar a wine palm, which, at the bottom of the hill and beside the banks of a stream, imposingly marked the edge of space.

  Íris’s eyes followed a bird that had taken off from atop the wine palm, You are like an ant crawling on the horse of invisible forces, forces from the deep recesses of the mind, forces from the soul, an ant that makes up stories about determining its own future, she said, once again as if she were talking directly to Dad, no longer addressing the plural and antiquated “ye” but the singular, informal “you,” and, thus, just him. You don’t decide beforehand, you are thrust into motion and make the decision that the motion suggests to you, you are not leading the donkey, you’re merely a tick on the donkey’s hide. God made men like machines, determined how they would function and what they would do, only allowing them to improvise minor variations within a prescribed set of motions. You can do whatever you want, but you cannot want whatever you want, for what we truly want comes from the outside, from God, from the devil, from spirits, and the different eras of history. I used to want one thing, but today I want something different. What we choose is the result of magic powers that come from the great beyond, that come from the spirit and pass from the spirit to our minds, to our bodies, said Íris. The greatest changes in my life happened that way, and as I have changed, so can you.

  As if our conscience were unable to veto our desires, and history did not allow us to reevaluate our experiences and dream of a different future, Dad believed for a moment that Íris was right, and, thus, no one would be responsible for the consequences of their actions, or their choices. No one could stand in judgment of anyone else, nor even of one’s own self. He could never be blamed for anything. It was destiny that had brought him to Paulão, and even to Lucrécia.

  But there is a tiny amount of chance in the way that things come about in this world, said Íris, and cause creates the future.

  Unfortunately, I have to head out, said Dad to Valdivino, But you just got here!, I wanted to introduce you to my friend, Not today, Valdivino, I’m not feeling well, let’s leave it for another day, suggested Dad, not because he was starting to feel dizzy and had a headache coming on, but because he wanted to avoid any embarrassment.

  The following month, January of 1960, on the night of a new moon, Valdivino urgently called Dad out to the Garden of Salvation. Lucrécia, who was also the Prophetess Íris Quelemém, appeared to have been assaulted and was confused, spouting nonsense. To his surprise, Dad encountered his partner, Paulão, there, I came out here to bring some order to this place, nobody out here has their feet on the ground, so I take care of the construction, the buying and selling, the money . . . she depends on me for everything.

  For the love of God, do something, said Valdivino, pleading with Dad, What happened? asked Dad, This is normal, replied Paulão, she’s just like that, she has these fits when she drinks those elixirs she makes; you know I like her, I already saved her life once when she hit rock bottom back when we were in Bahia.

  Íris had welts on her body. Did someone hit her? Valdivino wouldn’t respond to Dad’s questions, as if he didn’t want to reveal what had happened, She did it to herself, said P
aulão.

  I was relieved to see that she didn’t seem to recognize me, Dad told me, looking at the white wall and the barred-up window, I wasn’t ready to face her, at least not out there, in front of Valdivino.

  Someone had told me that on that trip out to the Garden of Salvation, Valdivino wanted to find out if Dad had really had an affair with Lucrécia, who was also Íris, and had lost his temper. Dad had denied everything, If you’re lying to me . . . , replied Valdivino, and then he made a vague threat, I’m going to end up killing someone.

  Three months later I found Valdivino himself stretched out on the ground and they told me a similar story, that he’d hurt himself, said Dad, continuing to tell me his version of the story, now that he was locked up between four walls. It had been the day after the inauguration of Brasília.

  I was ten years old at the time and on that day I had asked Dad if we were going to have to tear down our house in the Free City, the Pioneer Camp; I was afraid that my short career as a tour guide, performed in my spare time on some afternoons, would thus come to an end. The city was set to be destroyed once Brasília was inaugurated, and I had heard rumors about us moving to Gama or Taguatinga, but Dad and Aunt Francisca had told me, even up through 1959, that “Saint Bernardo Sayão” would save us. Through the Merchants’ Association and the Movement for the Permanence and Urbanization of the Pioneer Camp, they had joined forces with the customers, merchants, and residents of the city to change the name of it to Bernardo Sayão Quarter. Thus, instead of being destroyed, the Free City or Pioneer Camp, as it was also called, would stand as a permanent homage to the person that all of us admired as one of the great founders of Brasília. We didn’t have any reason to be worried about the arsonist blazes started by those who wished to defeat the movement for the definitive permanence of the city.

  Faced with the dry response of “of course not,” the Free City will never be destroyed, I further inquired if we had earned the right to live there by “system of commodatum,” the expression that I had memorized years before. There was no time for explanations, Dad told me, he had to make an urgent trip to the Garden of Salvation and wouldn’t allow me to go with him, Go with your aunts to the Childrens’ Festival, you have to tell me all about it, in detail, he ordered.

  It may be that my memory has mixed up recollections from disparate time periods, but I believe that it was at this moment that I heard Aunt Matilde singing along with the phonograph as she drummed on the tabletop:

  I’m not an Indian, nothing like that

  My ears aren’t pierced through front to back

  I’ve got no ring hanging from my nose

  No loincloth of feathers hung ‘round

  my waist, and my skin is brown

  from the sun on the beach where I was born and raised, ya know?

  I won’t go, won’t go to Brasília,

  Not me and not my family, nah

  not even to get rich, ’cause I don’t wanna

  Life can’t be bought, just lived

  even when it’s tough and expensive,

  I’d rather be poor than leave my Copacabana.

  It was an album by Billy Blanco, a present from Aunt Matilde’s friends in Rio. She laughed as she listened and sang along. She later said to me, About that conversation with your Dad, don’t worry, João, the Free City will never be destroyed, which to my mind is a pity, because all this is going to become the biggest slum in Brasília, you better believe it! Don’t talk that way, complained Aunt Francisca, Just look, the shops are all moving from here to W-3 Street, you’re going to have to open your business over there, Francisca. Aunt Francisca had lost a competition, which determined who would make the main cake for the inauguration of Brasília, to Royal Bakery, located on W-3 South.

  I remember it well, it was April 22, a Friday, and I was thinking that it had the makings of the best day ever, because the Childrens’ Festival was going to start at nine o’clock, and Dad had promised to take me. Instead, he shot off in his ’46 Ford Coupe, black as mourning garb. It turned into a sad day, since my aunts didn’t want to take me. My only consolation was that Brasília had been inaugurated the day before, I had seen the president up close, and Dad had told us that JK had predicted that in ten years Brazil would have a population of a hundred million and would be the fourth or fifth country in the world, in terms of economic power.

  And what conclusion have you come to about what happened to Valdivino?, I asked Dad, now that he was locked up between four walls because they hadn’t seen fit to pardon an inventive builder for failure to pay taxes and abide by the architects’ plans.

  One thing is certain, he had known Íris for a very long time. The photograph that I saw when I went into Valdivino’s shack reminded me of someone, and only later did I realize . . . It was a photo of a very young Íris, a photo that she had dedicated, on the back, to Valdivino when he was just a child. After I found out about certain things, I thought that he may have really had a reason to want to kill himself, taking large doses of those liquids that Íris made. I recalled the bottle that I had seen off in a corner of the little room . . . On the other hand, Valdivino was on the lam, it might be the case that he wasn’t in the crosshairs of the landowner he owed money to, but it was a fact that he was still being pursued by the father of that girl he got pregnant, and I tried in vain to get the police to investigate it. My other suspicion fell on the policeman from the SPB, who had disappeared and never turned back up, And you think that he’s the one who killed Valdivino? I’m not a detective, I did what I could, the only thing I found in Valdivino’s room, aside from the bottle, was a Continental brand cigarette, which could indeed have belonged to Paulão, but it didn’t prove a thing, because lots of people smoked Continentals. Some time later I spoke to Íris about it . . . As you know, she couldn’t be trusted. Paulão and Valdivino were competing for her, the former thinking that he owned her, and the latter bound to her by passion. Íris liked the fact that those rivals had become enemies and provided more than enough reasons for both their spirits to become routinely enraged. When I spoke with her, while she insisted that Valdivino hadn’t died, but had gone off in search of the City of Z, she confessed that Valdivino had tried to kill Paulão, that Paulão had defended himself, and that in the course of the fight Valdivino had fallen to the floor, unconscious. When he halfway came to his senses, he called out for me. They went to look for me in the Free City, but only found me the next day, But there was no crime committed, there shall be no crime in Brasília, she was saying, Or the crimes just won’t be discovered, I contested, No, there shall be no crime, she repeated. You know, it was hard to have a rational conversation with her.

  No one knows anyone else in their entirety, we go about creating an impressionist portrait of others in our heads from elements that we gather here and there, but the painting can change when we view it from a different angle, for it is painted by our very thoughts. We knew and did not know Valdivino. I knew and did not know Dad.

  But forget about the past, João, the past is long buried, he told me.

  I could fit everything that I felt for him during my lifetime—hatred, affection, respect, admiration, contempt—in that sober, severe face, in that deteriorated, debilitated body, in those defiant eyes, and that tired voice, but those were feelings and impressions that were mine alone, projected onto him, and nothing more. I felt that he had figured out how to face life with greatness, and his coldness and audacity, the risks he ran, his tireless work, and the actions that landed him in prison were nothing more than the proof of this. I wasn’t going to blame him for having been inflexible with his debtors and indifferent towards his creditors, but . . . a murderer? Was it possible to believe him?

  I’m going to tell you what I sincerely think, continued Dad, responding to my inquisitor’s silence, Valdivino revolted against his own situation, against the fact that he couldn’t possess Íris and was made to witness what Paulão did to her. He was threatening to reveal to the members of the commune that Ír
is had seduced him while he was still a child. And neither she nor Paulão could allow that to happen. For Íris, it would mean the end of the Garden of Salvation. For Paulão, the end of a source of income. But Valdivino, if he didn’t kill himself, perhaps died defending Lúcrecia’s life, maybe he gave his life for her, said Dad, How so, defending her life? Paulão raped Lucrécia right in front of Valdivino, saying, loud enough for him to hear, Look at this you little faggot, this is how you do it, and yelled at her, Here’s something sacred for you, you’re going to feel the sacred penetrating you, you slut whore, and then he threatened her: I can reveal to your followers all that I know about you, about your time in Salvador, you weren’t forced into that life, you liked it, you had a talent for it . . . You know, he was a brute, he was violent.

  Readers of this blog will remember that, on this subject, there were two whole pages of insults and descriptions that were inadvisable for a book that is directed at all audiences. I can’t bar the people who already read those pages from having memorized them, but I request that they do not reproduce them. The minute details of Dad’s story definitively do not have a place here, after this final revision.

  I asked, How do you know this? I’m not certain of it, it’s what they told me, he answered, And why didn’t you turn in Paulão to the authorities? Without uttering a response, and for the first time over the course of those days, an expression of anguish appeared on Dad’s face. Because your hands were tied, weren’t they, as a result of all the fraud he’d committed on your behalf, because you wanted to keep earning easy money . . . Don’t be unfair to me, I dissolved my partnership with him the moment I found him at Lucrécia’s side in the Garden of Salvation, That’s not enough, not nearly enough, why didn’t you turn him in? Because, as I told you, it might not have been true . . . , It was because he could destroy you any time he wanted to, and because Valdivino was just a nobody, I’m an old man, sick and unjustly punished, don’t make me die of sorrow, my son, did you come here just to hurt me?, believe me, João, these were merely suppositions, and still are—and when I heard these words, I felt that I was hastening his death, and that he was already in his final throes.