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By Jim Martin My Brazilian father-in-law wakes my wife and me at 6 a.m. to join him on his morning walk into Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil. This is when he releases his inner German soldier. At 88, he’s been walking four kilometers every day except Sunday, starting when he suffered chest pains 23 years earlier. It’s now 2003, and this morning, as always, José Gavioli Sobrinho becomes a German field marshal leading his troops to war. Head locked in a forward position, he sets a punishing pace conducted in iron-jawed silence. His long arms swing like pendulums, his big hands cupped as if he’s swimming through the humid Brazilian morning air. His relentless, mechanical stride suggests a machine assembled back in the industrial age. Wispy, white tufts of hair stick out from his cap and bounce in rhythm to his step. Today he wears a T-shirt with the word “ferryboat” on the back, reminding me of a Walt Whitman poem about the final ferry that carries us to the next world. Pai (or “Father,” which I always called him in Portuguese) is not ready to board the final ferry. He’s firmly rooted in this world, like the ancient tree roots we encounter that heave up and crack the sidewalk. We march around the roots, holes, rubble, dead branches, boulders to keep cars off the sidewalk, and sawed-off metal posts poking out of the pavement. The Porto Alegre sidewalks demand an alertness not required on ours in Minnesota, even in winter. Daisi and I struggle to keep up, little boats in the wake of an ocean liner. I know the route by heart and could take the lead, but Pai is always in charge, always in front of me during the 33 years I have known him. Daisi and I nickname these walks the “Forced March to Berlin”—Berlin being the name of the avenue on which we begin and end. Pai always takes precisely the same route, which curiously traces his German, Brazilian, and Italian roots. We start at Berlin, evoking his mother’s German ancestry. Then we take Benjamin Constante, named for a leader in Brazil’s independence movement. Finally, we turn onto Cristovão Colombo, recalling the Italian explorer and Pai’s Italian paternity. We barely start the walk and already we pass a semiconscious man with bloodshot eyes slouched on a stool in front of a small, neighborhood bar. I recognize him from previous years, a sentinel at its dark door. He waves a drunken greeting to us. Pai, who stopped drinking at 15, passes him as if he doesn’t exist. Incredibly, Pai raised four children without a drop of alcohol. We reach a tiny metal shack the size of an outhouse perched on the sidewalk. It’s owned by a locksmith, one of hundreds throughout this insecure city, keeping residents stocked with keys for a hundred thousand locks. He’s the one who, a couple years earlier, had borrowed Pai’s sledgehammer from the neighborhood baker, who had borrowed it from Pai. The locksmith passed it on to someone who never returned it. The baker gave a new one to Pai, who rejected it, boycotting the baker and his bread from that day forward. Without slowing down, Pai grabs the stool in front of the booth, as he does almost every day, and keeps walking. As if on cue, the locksmith cheerfully yells “ladrão!” (thief!) and Pai returns the stool. They smile, and Pai pushes on. Evidently, the locksmith is forgiven, but not the baker, who committed the Original Sledgehammer Sin. We cross the first lane of heavy traffic on Benjamin Constante, reaching a concrete island in the middle of the avenue. The island is home to several sickly pine trees that live in the roar of traffic instead of the silence of a forest. I feel the wind coming off the lethal river of fast-moving cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles howling and screaming perilously close to us. Unsteady, I grasp a tree, and with my other hand, I hold my 88-year-old companion’s arm to keep him from stumbling one fatal step forward. It feels strange to support the arm of this still-powerful man. “Vamos!” he shouts suddenly and steps off the island—a millisecond behind a passing car, as if it were imaginary and not a ton of high-speed, bone-crushing metal. I lurch forward after him, trusting this venerable ferryboat captain to lead me across this deadly river to its other side, life still linked to limb. Safely across, he shakes his arm loose, reasserting his independence, the motor that drove him through the Great Depression. We reach Cristovão Colombo and its nearly uncrossable stream of traffic. A bony-ribbed workhorse wearing blinders drags a cart loaded with cardboard for recycling. The driver snaps his whip on the wretched animal’s sweaty back. Sporty cars snarl impatiently around this plodding piece of Brazil’s past. We’re marching again. Pai leads us single file through crowds on the sidewalk or into the street to get around them, signaling to us with his arm to move closer to the curb. Our field marshal never looks back at us as he works his way through enemy territory in this guerilla war. I try to make small talk. No response. He is focused on our progress and keeping his troops in single file behind him. “Olha os carros” (Watch the cars), he warns, momentarily breaking his silence. He’s making forward progress, which is the arc of his life, starting in poverty and ending in the middle class. Pai makes a rare stop. He greets a hotel doorman, an old-timer hosing down the sidewalk against the promise of a hot day. As he does everywhere we go—butcher shop, grocery store, post office—Pai introduces me as “meu genro Americano” (my American son-in-law). The doorman asks whether I like President George W. Bush, then nearing the end of his first term. “No,” I say. He breaks into a broad smile, shakes my hand, pounds me on the back with his other hand in the semi-embrace men use in this nation. I’m embarrassed but sense Pai’s pride in the fact that his daughter married an American, a touch of approval, something I always craved from him. We pass an old woman clutching her purse to her breast. She gossips with another old woman through the imprisoning bars of a sidewalk gate. We walk around a man with dirty feet sleeping in a fetal position on the sidewalk. We pass a blind man, sitting with his back against a wall, holding out a delicate hand for coins. A young man in dirty clothes sleeps on the sidewalk on newspaper. Two young men are asleep in a driveway, their heads pillowed against a garage door. A family of four sleeps on the concrete next to the doors of a bank not yet open. A young Indian mother, perhaps from the Amazon, baby in her lap, sits begging for coins on the sidewalk with her legs sticking out so people have to step over them. We are witnessing the deep well of poverty, yawning wide open on the cruel sidewalks. This is the dark well Pai has worked relentlessly his entire life to avoid falling into. He and Sarah, his wife, achieved this with help from no one. In a city where assaults at gunpoint or knifepoint are commonplace, Pai has never been assaulted, except for boys snatching the cap off his head a couple times. Maybe it’s because he walks the busy streets, avoiding the vulnerable quieter ones. Maybe he’s been lucky. But maybe it’s like the African proverb, “You don’t teach the paths of the jungle to an old gorilla.” One block from home, his pace gradually slows, a big jet coming in for a landing. He breaks his silence: “Não se pode falar e respirar ao mesmo tempo,” he declares (You can’t talk and breathe at the same time). This tiny gem is just one on an endless string. Other jewels from him: Wear Clean Clothes. Be Frugal. Drive Hard Bargains. Solve Problems Quickly and Aggressively. Never Quit. He bestows these commandments on his imperfect son-in-law free of charge. Through his eyes, life is a moral journey. The first day I arrived at his house in 1970, recently married to his daughter, he summoned me into his bedroom, shut the door, and proclaimed in melodramatic Portuguese: “Nossa familia é sua familia. Nossa casa é sua casa.” (Our family is your family. Our house is your house.) He accepted me on the spot. But because I was young and immature, I accepted his generosity but not him, often feeling intimidated, frustrated, exasperated, and resentful. Pai died two years ago. My mean feelings toward him disappeared long ago, yet I regret them still. In retrospect, I was like a young tree, rubbed raw by a barbed wire. But over time, the tree grew around the wire, accepting it, and deeply embracing it. Jim Martin (M.A. ’70), a former editor at the Metropolitan Council, is writing a memoir about his father-in-law. He is retired and lives with his wife, Daisi, in St. Paul. First Person features personal essays written by alumni, faculty,
students, or anyone with a University connection. To find out more
about First Person, visit http://www.alumni.umn.edu/First_Person.html | |||||||||||||
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