dear son taue…
dear son peter…
yes… indeed… the colegio-militar brought me too much suffering…
but… on the other hand… during vacation…
I began naturally getting along at the beach with the other kids…
who lived in the neighborhood…
before learning how to surf…
I had spent much time on the beach…
enjoying it with this group of kids… friends of mine…
the latest trend was to catch the waves with a pair of fins…
and a wooden small board about one-meter-long…
it wasn’t the surf yet…
it was just the very-short-board practice of the “jacare”…
but it was really fun…
the little-board being made of wood…
used to glissade along the wave in a fast speed…
it was like a sort of morey-boogie…
with the difference that… in this case…
it was made of wood…
as I stayed on the beach during the months of vacation…
catching a lot of waves with my friends…
( even being on the beginners-level of the learning-process…
through the “jacare-style-of-body-surfing”…
with those short-wooden little-boards…)
this fact… gave me much familiarity with the sea…
sometimes the sea was rough…
but… even so…
we enjoyed our “jacare” with the wooden-little-boards…
( they were interesting… because when the wave was a closed-out…
we were able to dive back into the wave…
performing a sort of “take off”… out into the ocean…
and… that was possible… because the board… being made of wood…
could easily… dive backwards through the wave…)
in short… the way I learned how to surf…
was a very natural one…
it wasn’t something like… suddenly… in a bright day…
buying a surfboard… and jumping into the sea…
without too much preparation…
… no…
the way it actually was…
was through a natural process… a slow process…
with this experience of catching a lot of “jacare”…
with my little-group of friends…
we learned… together… to respect the sea…
we used to talk to each other:
“ there’s a strong-current… over there…
do you think we can make it…? “
there was a learning-development as a team…
where the sea itself was our main teacher…
--- --- ---
all this was happening during summer- vacation from 1965 to 1966…
and… because my birthday is in january…
I had just turned 12…
I was enjoying a very well-deserved vacation…
after receiving so much craziness in the head…
for an eleven-years-old boy…
finding myself face to face… to a regime so rigid…
presented by the school… I’ve just begun to attend…
but… this well-deserved-vacation…
was not enjoyed only on the sands-and-the-ocean of ipanema…
at prudente-de-moraes street…
in a building almost in front of the one we lived…
also lived there… the family of an old friend of mine…
the vitorino…
who used to sit next to me…
at the school during my childhood…
the same one… from the period in which I was still living in gavea…
near the jockey club… right next to the botanic-garden…
when I was from 7 to 10 years old…
in that same period when I used to take my little sister to school…
by trolley-bus…
very well…
to my surprise…
one day… on the side-walk… right next to our buildings…
vitorino and I… just bumped into each other…
I asked…
vitorino…?
and him…
luis…?
where do you live…?
right next door…?
I can’t believe it…
is it true…?
all set…
two friends from childhood had just realized that… now…
they are neighbors…
as soon as we re-met…
he already invites me to spend the vacation with him…
in the country-house of his family…
in teresopolis…
I asked my mother… if she would let me go…
and… she… promptly agrees…
because since the years of the elementary-school…
my mother knew already that vitorino belonged to a good family…
so… it would be no problem for me…
to spend the vacations with him…
in his country-house in teresopolis…
I packed a small suitcase…
and… there we went…
me… vitorino… his cousin mario…
his father… his mother…
in the car aero-willis…
gray color…
driven by the chauffeur… ( their private-driver…)
we arrived there…
a nice little-house… relatively simple…
but cozy…
those little houses typical of teresopolis…
where… at that time…
it was still a pretty good place to spend vacations…
such a mellow place… typical of the little villages…
where we could still see… horses… walking freely on the dirt-roads…
a tranquility…
next day we went to the club where vitorino was a member…
arriving there… we went to the swimming-pool…
but… to my surprise…
the swimming-pool… wasn’t being used as a place…
where people go to swim…
the swimming-pool was a meeting-place…
of vitorino and all his friends…
a very united group…
everybody already knew each other…
there should be about twenty… overall… approximately…
boys… girls…
most of them ages 11… 12… or… at most… 13 years-old…
they were the group of jews of vitorino…
very interesting people…
as we arrived at the swimming-pool…
nobody was interested in swimming…
we were… sitting on the ground… exchanging great chats…
“ we were…” would be just a way of saying it...
it wasn’t exactly like that…
it would be more correct to say:
vitorino was exchanging great chats with the girls…
in the bikinis…
they talked about everything…
politics… arts… cinemas…
gossips about the last relationships…
who was dating who… etc…
and I … completely out-of-place…
was… kind of perplexed… without knowing…
what was… exactly… going on…
still dazed by the sergeant’s order…
“ forward… march…!!...”
I stayed there… staring at the novelty…
as I used to do… at age five…
when I passed the days sitting on the wall…
seeing the few cars pass by…
suddenly vitorino wakes me up… there… at the swimming pool…
hey… luis… come over…
are you going to stay there isolated…?
as I listened to his friendly “hint”…
then… that’s when my complex turned out to be even more intense…
I realized that… unfortunately…
something wrong was going on… with me…
first… almost nobody was interested on me…
second… I … simply… wasn’t very used to that type of social gathering…
my family… had never encouraged me…
had never introduced me…
had never created conditions…
so that I could have the habit of chatting in a social-gathering like this one…
my childhood was on the streets…
playing soccer with my friends…
( or else… in a classroom… studying a lot of math… or something like that…)
I wasn’t prepared to handle such a sophistication of that kind…
vitorino’s group…
( maybe because it was a group entirely of jews )…
was used to have those social-gatherings…
( perhaps… since they were very young…)
and… they soon realized…
that I … was a sort of “cowboy”…
( in the sense of someone who is not very used to the norms-of-etiquette…)
but… if they weren’t too interested in trying to initiate a conversation with me…
on the other hand… they wouldn’t treat me badly either…
they respected me…
after all… I was vitorino’s friend…
--- --- ---
but… as I was sitting on the ground… by the swimming pool…
near vitorino…
diana… sueli…
all in bikinis…
and the chat going on…
and I just watching…
and talking almost nothing…
this wasn’t bothering neither vitorino… nor diana… nor sueli…
but… it was bothering me… deeply… to realize…
that I didn’t know how to chat…
nowadays… I try to understand the reasons :
( the history-of-my-life from zero to twelve-years-old…
didn’t prepare myself for that…)
but… at that moment… there… at the swimming-pool…
when people asked me to communicate a little-bit more…
… to try to talk a little-bit more…
at those moments… that’s when the torment got even higher…
it was like a had a very serious defect :
not to be able to speak…
not to be able to talk…
I felt bad…
I felt… as I was a being-with-defect…
not a physical defect…
but the defect… of… not to be able to talk…
in spite of this bad-sensation…
life was moving on…
in the morning… swimming-pool…
in the afternoon… little-parties…
every afternoon there was a little-party in the house of one of them…
music of roberto carlos :
“ I’m loving crazily…
the girl-friend of a friend of mine…
I know I’m wrong…
but I don’t even know how this all happened…”
we used to dance together…
the boy used to ask the girl if she wanted to dance with him…
( usually… they accepted…)
we danced in closed-position… embracing each other…
when the girl was interested in the young-gentleman…
the body-contact adjusted better…
and so… from that point on…
the chances towards a romantic-relationship…
were high…
and I … even filled with my complex of not being able to talk normally…
allowed myself… to get into the mood…
I asked the girls to dance…
I danced with them…
I tried to practice the exercise of “how to know how to talk…”
I used to observe…
I was optimistic… I could learn it…
I tried to do whatever was reachable…
I tried to fit in…
who knows…
maybe one day… I could have a girl-friend…
the same way vitorino had…
--- --- ---
a big hug…?
a big hug…
see you soon…
a super-hug… to both of you…
with much tenderness…
your father…
…luis antonio…