Day before yesterday

It was a sudden visit, one of those that arrive unannounced, without ringing the intercom. It was longing. The conversation flowed, turned into a journey, and when the visit ended, as subtly as it had arrived, I felt a longing for the longing itself.

Lady Saudade escaped, leaving behind smells, touches, images. Of the Hurricane of the World Cup, of Hojerizah's rock, of a night race in Gávea.

It's a good kind of longing, the kind that comes and goes. And after it settles, it returns. Longing in the singular, because longing is one at a time.

Nostalgia is different; it mixes time and space, it arrives edited. A concert where we only see the best moments. The encore and the applause, yes; the discord and the booing, never. A true nostalgist is certain that the present is only not worse than the future. But the bygone days, the yesteryear, what a colossus!

I'm nearing sixty-four, and every now and then I remember some of those many years of mine. I'll tell you a short story about a nefarious period for our country. The dictatorship imprisoned and tortured, while pre-teens lived in another world.

**

Life improved at home in 1970.

Grandma Lili took my siblings and me to São Lourenço. Summer vacation at the Palácio Hotel. In the Parque das Águas, an attraction in the Minas Gerais town, there was an ice skating rink, paddle boats, and bowling. Lili would put small change in a small white envelope and give it to each of us after breakfast. It was a kind of Vacation Allowance, which she renewed depending on our behavior.

Life improved further back home in 1971.

My father, a civil servant, was promoted at DNER. Along with my mother, he decided to keep my two brothers in the public schools they were attending. They were well-adjusted and their grades were good. But for me, who was about to enter high school, the plans were different.

Life improved significantly back home in 1972.

My parents chose the La-Fayette Institute for me and for my benefit, the same school my father had attended twenty years earlier. La-Fayette was private and much larger than the public Ecuador school, where I had finished primary school with great difficulty. La-Fayette had a soccer field (seven-a-side and one-a-goal), a covered court with a wooden floor. La-Fayette had a chemistry lab with test tubes, a geography room with embossed marble maps, a drawing room with an endless array of compasses, set squares, and protractors. La-Fayette had Dona Gertrudes' library with the Treasure of Youth in hardcover and gold lettering.

Life improved a lot, a whole lot, a whole lot more, in 1975.

La-Fayette was no longer just for boys. The other school, the girls' school, also in Tijuca, merged with the boys' school. In an unforgettable month of March, the new students disembarked from their Variant cars, Belinas, and Opalas. They also arrived hurriedly by bus, taxi, or led by the hand by mustachioed fathers.

Sea-colored skirts, milk-coated blouses, pristine white knee-high socks, and closed, round-toed shoes, known as "doll shoes." The most beautiful freckles in Rio de Janeiro adorned Denise's face. Marcia wore her honey-colored hair in a ponytail. Sandra had blonde braids; Lizete's smile was the prettiest. Vanda's eyes were the most striking: sometimes blue, sometimes gray. Lucia Helena held back her curls with a tiara. We tried to be discreet, but we couldn't take our eyes off Renata's legs. The same with the Anas, all beautiful. Ana Lucia, Ana Beatriz, Ana Silvia.

Life almost got worse in 1976. Almost.

New inspectors arrived with merciless punishments. While the disciplined students could play soccer and have lunch in the cafeteria, the troublemakers were divided: one group copied endless texts onto lined paper to improve their handwriting, then read and reread them aloud. The other group of "bad elements" filled the blackboard, from end to end, with multiplication or division problems.

Indignant at being called to the principal's office, my mother frowned, and even the neighbors heard the dressing-down: "We pay for the school with sacrifice, if you misbehave again, you'll go to boarding school! A priest's school! There, kids kneel on corn kernels, experience the paddle, and pray until dawn. Either you behave and study, or you'll go live in the seminary."    

A grade of eight in Biology saved me from the most painful punishment: being separated from my lovely classmates.

A stroll through memories while listening to the melancholic conversation of two friends with deep wrinkles and another with a forehead frozen by Botox.

They could have been three actors on a stage, or three mournful clowns in a circus ring. None of that; they were characters from a dream on a cold night last week. Nostalgic for nostalgia, they began to empty the first bottle in a dusty warehouse.

Kids these days have no idea about the nostalgia of the old days.

Good nostalgia was in our time.

Campari.

- Jaguar milk.

Each sprout...

- Not a bud, a mermaid.  

- Have you all lost your memory? Princess, majesty, darling, in the full splendor of your beauty...

The three of them fall silent, looking at their cell phones. Then, mine rings. It's five-thirty in the morning.

I write down the dream so I don't forget the pearls and turn away. Too soon, even for nostalgia.