Chained
Text excerpted from "The Drunken Angel," Sabia Publisher - Rio de Janeiro, 1969, pg. 105.
The prospect of the city changes completely when you are a tourist. In this condition, everything has a magical air: the doves, the beggars, the old, the roofs, poles, sidewalks, buses, transit, taxis, trees, bicycles, street performers, prostitutes, dogs and rain. Even the overcast sky has its charm when one is a stranger.
course, everything is absolutely new. Not so. I travel every year to Recife, I've seen and reviewed all its fine landscapes. But whenever I return, I feel that their small details are infinitely more entertaining than those of my city. I can argue that Curitiba is not exactly a fun and beautiful place, which becomes an untruth painful when I realize that I lack the prying eyes of tourists to see it for real.
One day I decided to try. I vaguely remembered from my travels: the street from Recife to São Paulo taxi drivers, Caruaru Fair to 42nd Street in New York the night on the pier to the cups recifense y tapas in Madrid and saw the gaucho Portuguese bucolic countryside. When you breathe these memories, I had the distinct feeling I was careful observer of these places, but they are just memory. Curitiba is real, tangible. The map is not drawn, are intricate in the brain.
With that in mind, I put my specs 'tourist' and went out to walk the 'XV' in camera in hand, by the book. Without preconceived ideas, I managed to find the beautiful flight of doves Santos Andrade, the beggars of the Riachuelo, Bolivians bagpipers, the living statues and poets who love the moon. Until the political campaign I've enjoyed: I took all the saints. I saw so many beautiful things, wonderful, stupendous. I went by Largo - ask to take my picture with the fountain - I entered the cathedral and made purchases at Casa China. Then take a small sightseeing 'by Rui Barbosa, the Tiradentes by Rua 24 Horas (I found it charming to be closed). So I went into the tube and caught the biarticulated, thinking everything is great. I walked in the Botanical and went home.
The next day, I was developing the film: it was burned. From my tour of Curitiba nothing left. Upon leaving the store, there in the confusion of Marshal Deodoro thought everything so banal, that wanderlust.
* Chronicle produced for Journalistic Writing III