October 1971

The Spring holidays were reserved for my long overdue visit to the Vila da Fraternidade in Londrina/Paraná. For four years saudade-letters have been going back and forth, and now the legendary figure - a Rute do Jardim, Ute of the kindergarten - will appear in flesh and blood. On the one hand I am looking forward to it; on the other I am thinking: will they be disappointed when the real me stands before them, after having become idealized with time?

I packed two huge suitcases with all the presents accumulated over four years in Germany as well as in Sao Paulo, bought my ticket, not for the bus but for a narrow-gauge railway, second class (I wanted to arrive as I had left Londrina then) and was seen off by Katerina. I remember clearly the feeling I had as I rode four years ago through the gloomy, endless outskirts of Sao Paulo and imagined how queer it must be for people loaded down with belongings and a dozen children coming from the northeast and hurled into such a confusingly enormous city and then having to adapt to an industrialized society. The first stop for most of them is the bus or train station, in which they find themselves among the crowd wrapped in rags or lying on newspapers. The second stop for many is a favela or sleeping places under bridges and underpasses.

I thought of this again as I rode slowly for over an hour through the city’s outskirts. I took out my sleeping-bag, for it’s still quite cool at night, and was thankful that the seats aren’t still made of wood as they were in 1967. After a fifteen-hour ride though, I was so stiff that I could barely lift myself from the seat. I dozed and was woken around midnight by an excited argument. Although the light isn’t turned off at night, a male passenger was bold enough to touch his neighbor’s thigh in an unchaste manner, whereupon the incensed woman began to shriek. Two parties formed immediately, one in defense of the woman, the other for the man. Each inveighed loudly against the other, getting hotter and hotter.

More and more passengers came up, not wanting to miss the show. Suddenly there was respectful silence: autoridade approached in the person of the conductor. Very serious, he listened to the witnesses, wrote down addresses and finally handed down his decision: the lecher had to leave the train. He was pushed out into the pitch-dark night at the next god-forsaken stop. He stood on the platform cursing the departing train. The next train would come on the following day. The discussion continued for a long time. An old man spoke important words about the seriousness of the situation, which had a comical effect, especially as his eyeglasses were tied over his ear with a black shoelace.

I dozed again until sunrise. With great composure the train left the miles behind it, winding its way through the fields, stopping every twenty miles or so. It seemed to me that there was less coffee planted than previously and more useful things: beans, rice, corn, manioca, etc. Perhaps the government’s measures to eliminate unproductive coffee-plants was having effect after all. The train went so slowly and in so many loops that it seemed to want to greet each field personally. A trip like that is so nice because you can look at the landscape calmly without having to worry about traffic, you take part in the general conversation and drink a cafezinho now and then.

Finally, at about eight o’clock in the morning, we came to the Paranápanema River, which separates the states of Sao Paulo and Paraná. Happy cries went through the train: Paraná, Paraná! Three more hours and I would be going past the Vila da Fraternidade and pulling into the station accompanied by the familiar toots. I found it especially exciting and moving this time, as though the train was announcing my return to the whole city with its tooting.

I walked through the streets as though I had never left. Still the same shops, the music store where we bought the records for the quadrilla, the wool shop where we bought our cheap wool. Only the store selling Macumba supplies, herbs and saints, was new. Then the end of the asphalt, down on the terra roxa through the red-light district, a right turn at the corner, past some wooden houses, then left down the hill and there was the Vila da Fraternidade with “our” house standing before me.

I knocked at Gelsa’s house and Uranio, who used to clean our school, saw me at the same moment. He has grown, but is as funny as ever. He recognized me immediately. Ah, é a ut ! Demorou mas finalmente chegou! (Ah, it’s Ute. It took a long time but finally she came.) An abraço, an embrace, and I was pushed into the store where a crowd of people stood around and Gelsa’s mother was behind the counter. Gelsa came running with her two-year-old Marcelo. Abraços.

On the surface a lot has changed. The old barracks and the wooden shed as well as the abandoned bus in which an Indian family lived have all disappeared. There are many new houses with electricity and running water and the streets are partly paved. A health-center of the Prefecture operates in our old house. They do the same kind of work as during the development aid times: fighting the parasitic diseases, stool-examinations, etc., only with more people. Even my work with children has found its successors. Three, sometime four women from the prefecture care for some children. Their efforts, however, seems to be limited to letting the children play on their own with wooden blocks and then pushing the blocks together again with a huge broom – at least as far as I could determine during the week I was there. Smartly dressed young ladies, they mostly stand around watching the children.

Seu Esau was doing the same from a place in the shade – in front of our ex-bicycle shed – playing “lady” with great intensity, with one eye watching the children on swings. He hasn’t changed a bit, the same help-seeking look, an eternal imitator of the higher placed. It is all quite bureaucratic, orderly and risk-free, but without life and enthusiasm. The main thing is that at the end of the day the list is ready and entered in a thick book that reports on the activities of the recreacionistas, play-time supervisors. It looked something like this: ball-playing – aims at coordinating the limbs and encourages sociability; building-blocks – encourages the imagination and equilibrium, etc, etc. And every day the same trash and the same warmed-over words. My skin crawled when I saw children who were too young for me to know them, but who knew my name from hearing it. A thousand things could be done with them, such as sawing their own building-blocks, weaving on simple wooden frames, making games, etc., all that we used to do with the children and what I have learned in the meantime. (Since 1975 things have improved somewhat; at least there are now sports.)

I had the feeling that this house, with all its employees, was like an island in the Vila without any radiation streaming out to the other inhabitants. No one really knew who these people were, what they were doing and what their names were. It’s strange to think that they are Brazilians and we were the foreigners. Kaspar, Adolfo, Ute, Otto have become unforgettable names. The entire Vila still vibrates with us. A vila ficou chata depois que voces sairam, it has become dull since you left. I was amazed at how deeply those two years are anchored in the children; nothing, but absolutely nothing have they forgotten. Tereza, Otalino, Vena and all the others could repeat word for word what I had once said on some occasion or other. They remembered every detail of the festivals, the outings, the sports-festival, the exhibition, the secret visits to Koch-Weser’s Fazenda, our raids on the abandoned fruit-farms, the wood gathering for the Sao Joao festival. All of it still lived in them, as though it had been yesterday and not four years ago. And whenever we reveled in nostalgia, it ended with the final words: mas agora é chato, nao tem quadrilla, nao tem brincadeito, (it’s so dull now, there is no quadrilla, there are no games).

For those children, who now mostly work as house-maids or in factories, those two years were a kind of golden childhood, full of the joy of life and crackling with the spirit of adventure. Now they must work, swallow their mistress’s insolence for a wage of 20 to 40 dollars a month, or get up at five in the morning and fill honey bottles till seven in the evening, or whatever other spirit-killing work they can get. But no one is there now to undertake something occasionally with them, organize a festival or encourage them in some other way.

Despite the separation which, for children, is a long time, we haven’t become strangers to each other. They are as open and willing as ever to tell me about their namorados, noivos (lovers, boy-friends) etc., as they once were to report on their childish experiences. Most are already engaged or on the verge of marriage. Even little Dirce, whom I left as a spindly nine-year-old, who has shot up but is even more spindly and angular, proudly told me of her forthcoming marriage.

I used my time to visit everybody. I sat in the same chairs in the same houses only with larger families now, sipped coffee like before, listened to what had happened in the meantime, and felt very good. But how much coffee I had to drink! And how often I ate beans and rice! Sometimes I ate lunch three times and dinner twice, always beans and rice. Come a comida a casa, eat here at home - I couldn’t refuse. The first two days everyone said I was much thinner (and prettier!) than four years ago. At the end of my stay they said I had gotten fat in Germany. In reality this was the result of the six-day stuffing in the Vila da Fraternidade.

Has life become better? I asked. Que nada, ficou do mesmo jeito. No, not at all, it’s all the same. Or, nothing much has changed, the Vila looks better, no more favela, but there is still not work for everyone, at least not regular work. A maid still doesn’t earn more than $20 a month, the legal minimum wage is $75. Sack-carriers earn by sack carried and earn up to $400 depending on how fast they can run, but only when there are sacks to carry. Gelsa’s husband was without work and dragged himself around the house somewhat embarrassed. Otalino, as a car painter, earns a kingly wage: almost $250, regularly, every month. He told me proudly about his trade and, cavalier-like, lost no opportunity to spoil me.

But life has changed, one just doesn’t notice it amidst the daily monotony. After a four-year absence the difference was immediately apparent to me: many children stream into the city and attend high school, many more have finished primary school with a diploma. The older siblings were left back sometime during their school time and finally dropped out in order to earn some money. Their younger brothers and sisters live in more orderly homes, do their homework on clean tables and finish school faster. I was happy for each one who told me he had learned a trade. And I was sad for each one of whom I heard that he had gone back to the land, to the roca (planted land), where there usually are no schools. In practice this means that at least another generation will pass before there is any kind of chance in life. Cido and his family also returned to the land.

In these four years Cido has an odyssey behind him. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see him, although he was advised by radio that I was finally back in Brazil. Shortly after I left Londrina in 1967, Cido’s family also moved, trading their house for a bar near Londrina. That didn’t work, so they traded the bar for a combi, packed their worldly goods and went to Sao Paulo. It must have been horrible: where to go in that monster-city with a family of ten? Seu Pedro, the father, was underway from morning till night in the combi transporting goods from one end of the city to the other. After three months they packed their things again and drove north, to Pernambuco, from where they had migrated twenty years before. They had relatives there (even a son who had been left behind with his grandparents because he was too small to withstand the strain of the journey to Paraná). The relatives had a piece of land from which now, suddenly, ten more people had to be fed. I think it was this idea of a piece of land in his own homeland which decided Cido’s father to turn his back on the “wealthy” south - saudade da minha terra. Gelsa told me how the whole family appeared again one day in Londrina looking so gaunt and miserable that they were hardly recognizable. From Londrina they continued to Faxinal, about 100 miles farther, where they traded the combi for a piece of land in Marumbi, the end of the world.

I will visit them for Christmas.

Dona Jacinta, the macumbeira, glows with composure and peace, as always. You feel calm just being near her. You sit on a rickety chair in front of her house, say something now and then, listen, make automatic slow movements. Haste gives way. And I believed her as a matter of course when she said that she had been sure of seeing me again. “E o destino”. So I went from house to house accompanied by Tereza who, just as before, never left my side. It is still somehow nice in the Vila, but the atmosphere that prevailed before, when something interesting was always being prepared, is absent.

On Sunday I had to leave. I was so tired that I slept through almost the whole ten-hour bus ride to Sao Paulo, but I was glad to have finally been in Londrina again.