dear son taue...
dear son peter…
so far… I’ve been trying to follow a chronological order…
in the narrative which tells the history of my life…
but I’m not sure if it is necessary to follow a order…
strictly chronological…
instead of telling everything that happened when I was 11 years-old…
then… at age 12…
then at 13… etc… etc…
maybe… it could be more interesting…
to try to do some little jumps…
which didn’t have to follow…
necessarily…
the chronological order of the facts…
we could suddenly adopt a narrative…
where from age 12…
we could jump to 18…
from there… to 24…
then… back to 16…
in this way… we would free ourselves…
from the obligation of having to follow… strictly…
a rigid scheme for narrating the events…
we wouldn’t have to follow the same order in which such events…
had happened in the real life…
the advantage of this “liberation” from the order…
is that…
if… by chance… in the real life…
a sequence of three years…
was such that… its phase was kind of… monotonous…
then… naturally…
the narrative would become also… monotonous…
and… varying on time…
this would make the narrative more varied…
and therefore… less monotonous…
--- --- ---
but… regarding certain “jumps” in time…
we shouldn’t worry about certain interesting facts…
that may have been omitted…
because… if… while narrating a story happened at age 24…
we feel the necessity of going back to 16…
we can… easily… make a movement like an accordion…
we can swing back and forth…
we can move forward in time…
and then come back…
in this manner… we free ourselves from the straitjacket…
of a linear narrative…
… of a chronological narrative…
--- --- ---
so… shall we inaugurate our new liberty…?
all ready… let’s go…
( this time… the jump is going to be a small one…
I’m going to do a little-tiny-jump…
from 12 to 14 years old…)
so… let’s go…
fourteen years old…
at this age…
good-bye ipanema…
we had already moved from ipanema to jardim-botanico…
near parque-lage…
between parque-lage and humaita…
at the foot of the mountain which leads to the christ-statue…
at corcovado-hill…
it was like we were living right beneath christ’s right arm…
on a little street called “j. carlos”…
… we used to say: “I live on “jota-carlos” street…”
jota-carlos was a designer… cartoonist… journalist…
from de decade of 1940… or 50 or 60…
something like that… ( I’m not sure…)
and… since he used to sign his cartoons…
published in the newspapers…
abbreviating his first name…
the street… to honor him…
adopted the name “j. carlos”…
in order to be in accordance with his known signature...
but… all this “bla-bla-bla” about jota-carlos…
has no importance at all…
I mentioned… in details… the origin of the name of the street…
because… whenever… (nowadays)…
my mother… my sisters… and tuipe…
are recalling facts from that time…
we mention them as the days at jota-carlos…
which happened… in my case…
during the time from ages 14 to 22…
--- --- ---
fourteen years old…
recently arrived at jota-carlos street…
my mother… super-happy…
showing the enormous house that she had just bought…
she and my father… sold the ipanema’s apartment…
and… bought this two-story-house…
but if we include the rooftop deck…
and a little tiny room that tuipe had adopted as his room…
… if we consider this third floor…
then the house could be classified as a three-story one…
and… since the first floor was located…
about two meters above the street-level…
(… the garage was also at that street-level…)
and… since the garage was functioning as a sort of mini-studio…
the house… according to this new “approach”…
could be considered as a four-story-house…
but… obviously… both the garage and the top levels…
were not very important ones…
( we couldn’t compare them to the two main-levels…)
this was the house at “jota-carlos” street…
--- --- ---
my mother… very proud… full of happiness…
as she showed the new house to a couple-friends of hers…
she was telling them…
what another couple-friends had commented :
“… lea… did you think twice before you closed the deal…?
… how marvelous… what a spectacle this house is…”…
indeed… one thing we couldn’t deny :
one thing the house had to offer :
much comfort…
it was spacious…
it was big…
it had many rooms…
to the point that each one of us had a room…
and… still another mini-room for my grandmother…
zenaide grandma…
my mother’s mother…
my grandmother… used to spend the day in her little-room…
watching television…
on the days of jota-carlos street…
I had already… (fortunately…)
freed myself from that torturing school…
… the “colegio militar”…
my parents had the common-sense of taking me out of there…
and to enroll me at andrews…
a school of the high society of rio…
where… by coincidence…
imagine who…?
exactly… ( you guessed it )…
where… by coincidence… vitorino was studying at…
--- --- ---
I got out of that rude and gross school…
where nothing was fine… nothing was delicate…
and… suddenly…
I found myself in a school of bourgeois…
where the cream of the society of rio used to attend…
and… this contrast… at the beginning…
made me feel a little bit dazed…
but… that’s all right…
long live andrews…
down with colegio-militar…
but… I don’t want to be ungrateful either…
the colegio-militar brought me… good things too…
the educational level was good…
I learned a mathematics of high quality…
--- --- ---
moreover… ( as it was observed in a previous email…)
the colegio-militar gave me the opportunity to know…
various kinds of people…
people with good-manners…
and people with other types of education…
which were far from being too refined…
and… this is good…
I think that… in order for us to be able to survive in this world…
it’s good to have passed through the opportunity…
of knowing the diverse “spectrum”…
of the various kinds of people that exist in this world…
with the experience… with the passing of the years…
and… with the opportunity to have coexisted…
with various kinds of people…
this should help us in our perception of who is who…
this helps us to be able to identify the rogue…
… to identify the person who is not-so-well-intentioned…
since the roguery wouldn’t be something so new for us…
since… we would have passed already through the opportunity…
of seeing them closely…
of coexisting with them…
of knowing how they think…
… how they act…
and… finally… to be able to compare their world-view with ours…
and… to be able to decide…
what is the best direction for us to go…
--- --- ---
but this doesn’t mean that…
the fact of having coexisted with the roguery…
is… by itself… something good…
it is also necessary… to have coexisted with refined people…
with people with good-manners…
it is necessary to have had contact with all the levels…
because… otherwise… we find ourselves with no options…
… with no choices…
in this matter… I consider myself lucky…
I knew many kinds of people…
the good ones… and the bad ones…
vitorino… was smart…
he knew that… for that matter…
the education my parents were trying to give me… was really good…
since childhood… my parents let me play in the streets…
they knew the streets had lots of things to teach me…
( in a similar way I did with respect to you…
when I let you play at vila-street…
… in the group of junino… grissa… diogenes…)
vitorino was smart…
he knew that… for that matter…
my life-style was… perhaps… healthier than the one he used to have:
I was used to live in the streets…
… or… to face the big swells at arpoador…
with my friends… “urchins”…
later on…
when I was already living at jota-carlos street…
when I had already… (fortunately)… dropped out “colegio militar”…
and started to study at andrews…
I continued to cruise along with the group of rocha-pinto’s friends…
… at lagoa…
now… living at jota-carlos street…
while my group-of-friends were living at lagoa…
I couldn’t visit them on foot… anymore…
I had to take the bus…
but… even having to take the bus…
it was worthwhile to go there…
there… I continued feeling comfortably at home…
without having to “fit” myself into the “priggishness”…
imposed by the new style…
of my new bourgeois-school…
the andrews…
in short :
my life was… basically…
an eternal struggle for adaptation…
adaptation to the “scare” of having entered…
into a super-neurotic school of the kind colegio-militar….
adaptation to the new bourgeois-school… the andrews…
filled with its new priggishness…
… its new little-social-rules…
… its etiquettes dictated by the cream of the society of rio…
but… this type of “scare”…
… this time…
didn’t “scared” me that much…
I had already passed through a similar experience…
at age 11 during the vacations in teresopolis…
with vitorino’s group of friends…
this time…
while I began to attend andrews…
right in the middle of the academic-year…
as a new student…
this time…
I didn’t feel so bad as usual…
this time…
I had already learned the basic lessons…
of the etiquette-rules…
during the period of teresopolis…
this time…
things were more under control…
but… still…
the tension… ( perfectly understandable )…
resulting from the sensation of being a new-student…
in an new-environment…
completely different from colegio-militar…
was intense…
but… as I had observed before…
the shock this time… was more tranquil…
… fairly smooth…
I adapted myself more quickly…
--- --- ---
see you soon…
I will wait for emails from you…
telling me details of how things are doing there…
see you soon…
a super-super hug…
on this first day of the year…
a big hug…
your father…
…luis antonio…