dear son taue...
dear son peter...
life… at that time… in ipanema…
was a mixture of things…
a mixture of different environments…
and… contrasting ones…
my friends… were of very different backgrounds…
I used to connect with friends…
whose backgrounds were super-refined…
and… also… with some other ones…
who… in spite of belonging to middle-class families…
even so… they used to have moral principles kind of suspicious…
… life-values pretty different than mines…
but… that’s all right…
in the midst of all this diversity of influences…
I was learning from all of them…
and… on my part…
also contributing to their learning…
--- --- ---
when I arrived at rio-de-janeiro… from recife…
in july of 65...
at age eleven…
and… as I got amazed to see…
for the first time…
the surfers riding the waves at arpoador-beach…
my number-one-dream…
was… to be able to surf…
as I said in previous emails…
the learning-process happened in a gradual way…
my first experiments…
were accompanied by a little board made of styrofoam…
later on… when I was already belonging to the group…
which used to ride the waves with the little-wooden-board-and-a-pair-of-fins…
the technique of the “jacare” evolved a lot…
because the problem with the styrofoam-little-board was that…
as we “duck-dive” the wave…
the probability to “loose” the board was enormous…
on those days there were no leashes…
( nobody had thought yet…
about this idea simultaneously simple… and brilliant…
which is to attach the board to the person…
using an elastic cord…)
so… when we were practicing the “jacare” with the little-styrofoam-board…
the chances of loosing the board were enormous…
but with the “little-wooden-board-and-pair-of-fins” equipment…
things were different…
the little wooden-board wouldn’t float…
and so it would be much easier to “duck-dive” the wave…
without loosing the board…
moreover… the pair-of-fins offered a fantastic impulse…
an initial-velocity indispensable…
for the success of the drop…
the phase of the little-wooden-board…
was an important one… for me…
not only because my “jacare” had evolved a lot…
but also because I suddenly found myself…
belonging to the group of “kids” from ipanema… who… like me…
couldn’t afford to buy a longboard made of fiberglass…
--- --- ---
but… it’s interesting to see…
how this process of rescuing facts from memory…
develops itself in such a way…
that… as I keep gradually writing…
new observations which were kind of abandoned…
there… deep inside the memory…
end up emerging back to the surface again…
and… if I weren’t writing these stories…
maybe… certain details… which were very deep down in the memory…
maybe… they would never re-appear again…
one of these details…
was that… it was thanks to peredia…
( mentioned in a previous email…
the one in the bus… from “colegio militar”…
who was together with rocha-pinto…
proudly talking about their adventures… on saturday…
with the prostitutes of downtown area…)
and… as I was saying… it was thanks to peredia…
that I was introduced to the group of the “jacare”…
that is… to the people of the little-wooden-boards…
--- --- ---
this little-wooden-board…
was a product made with some amount of work…
first… we had to go to a little store in copacabana…
to buy the little-wooden-board which was only available…
in that specific store…
second… we had to cut the tail of the board…
in order to shorten its length…
if the original-board had… let’s say… about six palms in length…
then… after the cut… it would have about five palms in length…
with the leftover…
that is… with the remainder of the wood that had been cut…
we saved it… to make the fin…
next… it was the time for the painting…
new drawings were painting on the board…
and… in this way… each one of us ended up with his own little-board…
super-well-made… painted by hand…
with its length reduced…
and… the most charming of all…
with a fin…
which was constructed and installed by ourselves…
everything hand-made… by ourselves…
on a very-small concrete space…
which was still available…
between cid’s building… and the side-walk…
at prudente-de-moraes street…
we spent a whole afternoon…
manufacturing two new boards…
mine…
( since I had already been introduced to the group by peredia…)
… and also mario-tro-lon-lon’s board…
cid…
ze-carlos…
and joao…
had already their boards…
they were only helping us to build ours…
since they were the ones that knew the technique of sawing-the-tail…
… of the construction of the fin…
and… of the final-art of the painting…
--- --- ---
and I… over there… working with them… on the board…
had no idea of how good it was to my life…
the fact that I… accidentally… find myself… completely well-accompanied…
to the group of the “jacare”…
as time went on… each one of us followed different directions in life…
but cid… and ze-carlos…
kept being my friends during a long time…
shifting the story a little bit to the future…
to the time that I had already the long surfboard made of fiberglass…
I should anticipate that…
cid… ze-carlos… and… I…
were (already in this future-time...)
everyday… (during vacation…)
all of us three… always together…
in the continuous mission of…
having to carry that extremely heavy surfboard…
three meters long…
( but these are facts belonging to the future…)
at this moment… we were still on that little concrete-side-walk…
sandwiched between cid’s house… and the side-walk…
building the little-wooden-board…
--- --- ---
nowadays…
as I write these lines…
I realized that…
the fact that I was able to be introduced…
into the group of cid and ze-carlos…
… was thanks to peredia…
if… on one hand… I wasn’t feeling too much comfortable…
knowing someone so different from me…
capable of amusing himself with the prostitutes of downtown…
( in company of our friend rocha-pinto…)
on the other hand… nowadays… as I recall…
as I retrieve… from the very deep-regions of memory…
that it was thanks to peredia…
that I was able to get into the group of cid and ze-carlos…
this demonstrates why… sometimes…
the “colegio militar” wasn’t something (totally) 100% bad…
if… the school had its flaws… fortunately…
it also offered some advantages…
one of them… was the fact of being able to know all kinds of people…
as peredia introduced me to the group…
I was able to develop friendship with a group of kids in ipanema…
who were more free… more used to live in the streets…
and… consequently… more prepared to deal with the difficulties…
of the world…
in contrast to ronaldo and vitorino…
the group of cid and ze-carlos used to live…
in a kind of world where most of population was living…
with its stories of dramas…
where the financial struggles were considerable…
after the famous vacations with vitorino’s group-of-friends in teresopolis…
vitorino and I… seldom were seeing each other…
this was because he was attending his school…
a refined one… a private one…
which wasn’t coincident with my trajectory at “colegio militar”…
my new group-of-friends was rocha-pinto and peredia…
inside de bus…
but… right after peredia had introduced me to the group of the “jacare”…
he just disappeared…
( he traveled… or something like that… he went away…)
it remained only… rocha-pinto…
and the group-of-the-beach based on cid and ze-carlos…
but rocha-pinto… was rarely at the beach…
what he really liked was to stay with his group at “lagoa”…
talking about women and similar issues…
--- --- ---
in the meantime…
the sea could turn itself pretty rough…
especially after the southwest wind begins to blow…
a wind that used to blow from leblon to arpoador…
a strong wind…
which produced those little-wind-waves throughout the whole ocean…
looking like little “sheeps”…
cid and I… looking at the sea…
cid used to say…
“ usually when the southwest wind blows…
it rains next day…”
that was trully precise…
the next day… a huge storm shows up…
and with the storm… the big swell shows up too…
and when the big-swell decided to come…
it surely comes with huge waves…
nobody dared to go out…
not even the most experienced ones…
on the days of the swell…
usually under a cloudy weather…
the sandy part of the beach seemed like a desert…
but even so…
moved by curiosity…
enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts of surfing…
used to walk all the way to arpoador…
in order to see the furious ocean…
to exhibit… with all its exuberance…
its immense power…
the giant waves slamming against the “pontao”…
literally “sweeping” the “pontao”…
the crowd…
astonished… used to see…
such beauty…
such manifestation of nature…
it was the day of the swell…
on the day after…
already under the east wind…
the sea calmed down just a tiny little bit…
now… without the southwest wind to disturb…
the sea had no wind at all…
near the horizon… the ocean was flat… like a mirror…
but… near the beach… the waves were just perfect…
waves… three to four meters high…
coming with perfection from the “pontao”…
generating that super “wall” to the left…
it was simply…
… the greatest spectacle on earth…
--- --- ---
see you soon my sons…
in the meantime we keep exchanging emails about other issues…
about your daily life…
see you soon…
see you next time…
a super-super hug…
very tight…
your father…
…luis antonio…