We didn’t know youth ended when the van left — with a mattress, a patchwork, two full backpacks, a frying pan and meatballs — just around the corner in the Social Security district near the USP. view and Dora and Vlamir of our lives.
Certainly, we were too young to re-understand the aftertaste of words. It would be long, well, bad, surprising, tedious, intense, empty, colorful, faded, passionate, exhausting, exciting, hopeful, desperate, remember this van departing from Sao. Paulo to the port of Santos.
- Vlamir and Dora were the first to leave the house.
- Then.
- One by one.
- We left the sweet republic of the university years.
- The last to turn off the light was Anne.
- Who resisted as much as she could.
- Said that leaving home was waking up from a good dream.
We were young, so voracious of drinking, chewing and swallowing experiences and novelties. For us, a month had the intensity of a year. Maybe, secretly, we already knew that life is a week, youth is a day.
We also wanted to know, touch, love everyone we could handle, we aspired to share the body and the intellect. Fraternization indiscriminately included the classroom, the bed, the academic center. Seeing through the rearview mirror, we were lucky. We started sexual intercourse with the provision of contraceptives and before the onset of HIV/AIDS.
The house in the Social Security district collapsed, containing everything a good house shouldn’t have: wet walls, minimal plugs, an outdoor washing tank, a sloppy garden and a single bathroom.
Imagine twelve bodies, not counting visitors, sharing showers, toilets, a tiny sink. As there were many for three rooms, the solution was to create plywood partitions, simple and cheap agglomerate.
They multiplied the rooms, since they did not reach the ceiling, we listened to everything that was said, we also followed the sighs of the lovers and the lament of the rejected loves, there were no secrets between us. Lie.
But at the time, we thought it was true. We were twenty-five years old and everything that exists in the world, in our opinion those inserted into the system?Formal contract workers, married with old paper, over 30 years old, apolitical, religious students?They suffered from hypocrisy.
In our opinion, our parents in their fifthing had failed in their dreams. The years had to burn calendars to understand that most of our dreams would also remain dreams.
Schoolchildren, fed, carefree, we had self-esteem at the top and beauty in every pore, our eyes shone like crystal balls in the sun, our generation was very different from that of our future children: no one applied to do internships in companies, celebrate the market, compete like crazy, accumulate capital. We wanted to go out on the road with a backpack on our backs, changed in the pocket and sandals on our feet.
Some of us made a memorable trip to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, departing from the sumptuous and British Estacao da Luz, at a time when passenger trains were not yet threatened with extinction and would then be razed. At Bauru station we changed the composition and the dream began.
We cross the Pantanal del Mato Grosso with herons, efus, sunsets, bridges over magnanimous rivers, nature has spilled its feathers, sequins, confetti, perfume launchers, a green carnival.
After a day, a night, another day, we reached the warm Corumbo, we went to sleep badly at the farm. Lined bunk beds, polyester sheets, ceiling fan with a purely psychological effect. The heat was such that Dora, in her absence, in epidermal despair, spilled a can of coca on her body.
The next morning, brand new, we crossed the border on foot, in Puerto Quijaro we embarked on the mythical train of death, each generation has its menu of myths, legends, icons, idols, taking the train of death functioned as initiation. Something that separated those who had taken this train from those who had not yet.
He took us to Santa Cruz de La Sierra, then, once again, we changed composition and dispersed in the hills of La Paz, then traveled by truck to Lake Titicaca.
Located at an altitude of 3,800 meters, titicaca claims the primacy of being the highest navigable lake in the world. Its deep blue, more than eight hundred square kilometers are home to popular islands, including the famous Moon and Sun.
With a deep blue, Titicaca was breakfast, lunch and dinner for backpackers of the 70s/80s. Financial ease was combined with all these attractions. Tourism through Latin America’s open veins was very cheap.
In Bolivian Copacabana we climbed the tourist route Via Crucis, with its 14 spas, when we reach Mount Calvary we were blessed by a lysergic view of the lake with its enigmatic face, deciframe or drowning you.
It was on this climb, around the eighth season, that Henrique broke up with Ana, I’m dating Mercedes. Ana babbles: Mercedes, that big nose in history? (Silence) What about us, Henrique?(silence).
On our return from Bolivia, we were very annoyed by the separation of Henrique and Ana, who, a little older than the others, were the founders of the sweet republic, the house was rented in the name of Henrique’s mother and the guarantor was Ana’s. father, they would soon leave home, all by his side, each in his own life.
The waters that follow, we try to transform the lived experience into an expression appealing to others. We started writing. Some talented. Others, with willpower. Valmir composed songs. He wrote wonderful words that smelled of the Andes.
The Republic of Welfare was made up of journalism, film, theater and fine arts students. Jericho and me? We have proposed our texts in the editors of the main publications. No one agreed, but we didn’t give up.
What touched us was the fantasy. We were looking for reporters like The Reale Magazine, but we thought it would be enough to show our text pages to newspaper and magazine editors to demonstrate our immeasurable talent.
Time was what we had to give, borrow, sell. Life was supported by eternal promise. Success would be ours. Former professionals who have retired to their beach or cottages renounce the similarity of their work and give up their spaces for the new. For us.
Old age was as far away as Jupiter’s Land, we wouldn’t get sick, we wouldn’t die. We were goddesses and gods for the simple and irrefutable fact that we were young; But reality has not forgiven us; how we had not forgiven our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents; how, much later, I didn’t forgive our children.
The taste for maturity came in the form of political violence. In the spring of 1977, defying activists with brucutus and authoritarianism, the student movement organized a meeting at the PUC in Sao Paulo to reorganize the National Union of Students (UNE), out of the military dictatorship.
Hundreds of police, civilians and military, invaded the university campus, handed out clubs, threw gas bombs, pushed, wounded, threatened, some students suffered severe burns. More than 700 students, mostly from the USP, were arrested.
After a concentration in the parking lot in front of the PUC, after the colonel-in-chief of the invasion gave a fascist sermon, we were put on buses, chartered by the police, bound for the battalion on Tiradentes Avenue. We were in a cane.
Several years later, Ana wrote a book, in which one of the passages recounts that night: We were taken in an Indian line, in a Polish corridor, where the police hit one yes, another did not. me/bad-I-I-I want.
The direct experience of police repression affected everyone and subtly marked an imaginary line between before and now. The cheerful brazening of the house is over and, like a castle of cards, under the effect of a violent blow, our plywood walls fall to the ground.
Without laughing or drama, everyone took her backpack and put on her leather sandals, until Anne turned off the last light. For a long time, though separated, our eyes would still shine like crystal balls in the sun.