dear son taue…
dear son peter…
we were in rio-de-janeiro at age eight…
going to school by trolley-bus…
together with my sister clarice who was four-years-old…
and… on the way back… I preferred to walk home…
since the money of the trolley-bus-ticket…
was spent on the pop-corn-little-bag…
my life together with the group of kids on the street…
was pretty good…
we used to live near the “jockey club do brasil”…
where the people who had money… used to go there and have fun…
gambling on the horse-races…
one day… one of the kids of our group… had an idea…
he proposed that we could spend the whole sunday…
of the “grande premio brasil”…
each one of us… with a flannel duster…
taking care of the cars... of the people who went there to gamble…
that was the first time I worked in my life…
although I’m not sure if we can call this… work…
the cars were coming around noon time…
they parked on the streets of the neighborhood…
we helped the drivers to maneuver their cars into the…
narrow slots parallel to the side-walk…
at the very end of the gambling section of the “grande premio brasil”…
that was the time of our real activity…
we had to go from one car to another…
trying to get the tips…
they were so many… at the same time…
that… many of them… just went away…
it was like the end of a movie-section…
at a certain instant “X”…
everybody leaves at the same time…
well… after that…
we counted all the money collected…
and… we purchased a leather-soccer-ball “G-18”…
I still remember the model of the ball: “G-18”…
--- --- ---
at age ten…
my family moves back to recife…
this time… we were living in the house of my grandfather…
the father of my father…
he had just passed away…
and… that was the first (and only) time that I saw my father crying…
he was crying out loud…
saying…
“this is terrible…”
“this is terrible…”
and… my mother was at his side... comforting him…
a scene of tenderness…
of love between my father… and my mother…
something rare…
because… usually… they were fighting… almost all the time…
for some silly reason like…
“you left the window open…”
( my father complaining to my mother…
when he was coming home from work…
usually… tired and bad-tempered…)
“you were probably reading the "Time-magazine”…”
( he… complaining of the fact that she… (according to him…)…
used to spend all day reading the “Time-magazine”…)…
--- --- ---
my grandfather had passed away recently…
and… soon after… my grandmother… also…
they used to live in recife…
in a big house…
with an enormous yard…
full of trees…
in a street called amelia…
since my grandparents had passed away…
the house became kind of empty…
and... a cousin of mine called mariana…
was living there together with one of my grandmother’s sisters…
whose name was tia lurdes…
so… my parents decided to move from rio-de-janeiro back to recife…
because… since the house of my grandparents was… almost empty…
we could live there…
at this point… something interesting happened…
I… had to go to recife… earlier than my family…
because I had an entrance exam ( in order to be able to enroll myself at school )…
on a certain day… which was about two months earlier…
than the time my family was supposed to move…
and that was when… for the first time in my life… I travelled by plane…
and... all by myself… with age ten… going from rio to recife…
( but my father knew a friend of him…
who was travelling on the same flight…
and so... my father asked him to accompany me during the trip…)
arriving at the airport in recife…
I found... waiting for me:
my uncle marcos ( my father’s brother… who later became a politician…
and… even later… a senator…)… and his wife carolina…
from that point on… a very new phase in my live just started…
me… at amelia street… in company of my cousin mariana…
and of tia lurdes…
they used to watch soap-opera in the evening…
and... for the first time in my life…
I “dove” into the world of “soap-operas”…
fictitious stories… virtual stories…
but they were able to put myself in contact with a certain “reality” of life…
which I wasn't used to...
later on I could realize that…
many of these dramas from the soap-operas…
can indeed happen… in the real world…
should we stop here…?
we should stop here…
see you soon…
with tenderness…
your father…
…luis antonio…