“What a lousy Christmas, Pedro!” and stories from São José

Compadre Pedro (in Brazil, compadre is the bond between a child’s parents and godparents, and a term of close friendship) is the compound name of the late neighbor Pedro Zotto. He and my grandfather Jorge Camargo, in turn Compadre Jorge, built their houses in an undeveloped area of São José dos Pinhais from the 1950s on. They were such friends that, besides houses on corners of the same intersection of Avenida das Torres, they bought mausoleums side by side for retirement. Compadre Pedro moved to his final address a few years ago.

While the husbands got along very well, the wives waged permanent war. Though comadres, they never missed a single opportunity to cause the funniest messes. “Very Crazy Neighbors,” on your afternoon matinée (Sessão da Tarde, a Brazilian TV movie slot). The fights were so trivial that we always had the impression that the comic stood above all. Comadre Ida also moved to her final address.

Both families went through the hardships typical of those who are poor and have any dignity. They were plundered, mainly, by religious ideas, by terrible illusions. They tried, for a lifetime, to solve things with spells. Candles, prayer chains, along with plenty of religious intolerance. The ones who never let themselves be affected by such nonsense were the compadres. And the then-children.

One of the games of those children that I would love to have filmed was the wedding. There were bride and groom, the couple’s mother and father, godparents and, of course, the priest. Juarez would sneak Comadre Ida’s black dress to use as a cassock. They also held exorcism services. One time, the father of a neighborhood child saw his son playing a possessed person and took off his belt on the boy. Not to mention the “macumba to die” (a hex to kill), which gathered stones and a little grass. Childhood freedom very quickly converted into cultural imposition, and the games ended.

The dead count, and not a few, leaving in me both longing and anger. One of my neuroses is to blame the dead for their deaths; I do not forgive them for leaving me without them.

Last Christmas, Compadre Pedro’s great-granddaughter sat in Compadre Jorge’s lap. Upright as a thick-trunked oak, Jorge cried twice on seeing the old Zotto house demolished. And he cried once more when he held the great-granddaughter who is also his.

About thirty years ago, when the Christmas party was the same for those families of the heart, and life’s degeneration was in full swing, a relative of Compadre Pedro said to him the line that is repeated several times a year to this day:

—What a lousy Christmas, Pedro!