Oh, my Brazil … chaos, samba, carnival, football, slums, mulatas, copacabana, corcovado, pelé, niemeyer, villa-lobos, jk, bossa nova, jobim, slums, amazonas,
the nordeste (northeast region), the pantanal, petrobrás, corruption, brasília, the “canarinho” team, land of the futur, more than a land a continent, giant by its own nature, so the national hymn, eternally lying in a splendid bed, god! what a land, pardon “great land” …

Lula, after two sinister decades of military dictatorship and some predecessors
who, mostly corrupt and quite inept, didn’t bring anything, lula is said to have
reinvented the country —he, the half illiterate, the demagogue, the gullible fool—
and now, there he is, the great guy, international prestige and so, europe, china
and africa, onu, the military mouth shut as it should be, well, more or less, and
leading and ordering is the former guerrilla fighter lady dilma, who’s said to be
the fourth more powerful woman in the world … well, well, who'd imagine it!

The second decade di nostra vita … better forget it. Tempi passati.
A past time full of shades and gaps, too far away to be remembered with details
of less importance.

Lavrinhas: idyllic landscape. Right. Apart from that, monastic rules, rigid, no fun,
discipline and faith, like barracks.
It remained, beginning with the Gregorian chant, the fondness for singing.
And for books, books and more books, as well as for an incurable intellectual
curiosity: thinking, reflecting, looking up words, playing with words, aligning
words. As for the rest … hey, it’s silence!

Other stages of the pious and rough monastic adventure, nothing of nostalgic or
glorious memory: novitiate, temporary vows, the so-called “philosophy” years.

Going for gold and the dreamed green stones, the inexaustible and fierce bandei-
rante paulista Fernão Dias Paes Leme —whose eyes tired of emerald hunting would
never see them and whose hands injured by moving heaven and earth in search of
an untraceable treasure would never reach the glory to touch it— discovered back in
the Ides of 1674, and today everyone knows, admires, praises [who saw it, who was
there] the natural beauty, the sympathy, the peculiarity of the wonderful green pearl
called Passa Quatro … right on the other side of the Sierra [Mantiqueira] coming from
Rio or São Paulo:

A quiet southern Minas village, picturesquely embedded in an idyllic and cozy shell at
the foot of the majestic peaks of the Mantiqueira, at first glance like forgotten by time,
with an air of Sleeping Beauty, but anyway not stopping to modernize, with good infra-
structure, comfortable hotels, some luxury, and countless touristic attractions of per-
manent and renovated fascination for its natural environment.

The third decade: I fell into the bottomless and unbridled world called “Pauliceia”, forced to exercise and support activities unthinkable today, from general services
at the regional administration of a bank, bankrupt and disappeared long ago …
passing through I don’t know how many companies and jobs, knowing closely all
sorts of trickery and misdeeds … and where, breathing [without suffocating] the
most polluted air that had passed through the lungs of a highlander, I learned a
thousand tricks of survival, as to get honey even from stones, from asphalt and
most especially from the countless starving, ravenous, crazy mouths of the
hallucinated and amazing girls of the night, and of the day too …

São Paulo: prolonged and profound mental purification bath.
Whoever comes out clean, can be canonized in the act, Santo Subito!
Holier than any Catholic Pole!