THE LETTER

 THE LETTER

I write you these poorly traced lines, my love

Because longing came to visit my heart

I hope you excuse my little mistakes, please

In the phrases of this letter that is a proof of affection

Maybe you don't even read it, but maybe you'll even give

Immediate response calling me honey

But what matters to me is to confess to you once more

I don't know how to love anyone else in life

Benil dos Santos and Raul Cocco, with these verses, created one of the most beautiful songs of Jovem Guarda, immortalized by the voice of Erasmo Carlos, the eternal Tremendão. This song, "A Carta", summed up the emotion that existed both in the act of writing and receiving a letter. Unlike today, when you simply type a message and it is automatically received by its recipient, letters faced a true epic from their dispatch at a post office to their arrival at their final destination. Many of them were lost along the way, due to a thousand reasons. One of them was undoubtedly the writer's handwriting, often simply unintelligible. Sometimes the handwriting was so difficult to decipher that it ended up neither going to the intended destination nor returning to the person who wrote it, as the messengers simply could not decipher what was written on the envelope. And so, the missives ended up getting lost along the paths of fate...

How many novels stopped happening because the letters didn't reach their final destination? And how many loving disappointments did they register? I believe many. Everyone over thirty has at least one story to tell about their love and the mail... Romances that were born or died in the simple reading of a letter... and our songbook has several records of situations that occurred, with a constant bigger than we could imagine. How many people have not experienced the situation portrayed in the song "Mensagem", sung by Vanusa, for example? For those who don't remember, or don't know the song, the character receives a letter from an ex-boyfriend and doesn't have the courage to read it, because he had been dumped in another letter... yeah, even if you don't believe it, this was very common. Although, when you think about it, it persists to this day. They don't leave by letter anymore, but how many romances are not broken by text messages, whatsapp... the difference is that today the breakup is instantaneous...

But the letters that circulated the country from north to south, east to west did not live on romance alone. They were mainly used to send and receive news from distant relatives. The son who left his father's house in search of fortune at the other end of the world, the brothers who were going to explore new horizons... as I said at the beginning, the letters faced true epics from their origin to their final destination. And when a family received a letter from a distant relative, it was a real celebration... everyone gathered around the chosen person to read that important message. And they were delighted with each sentence deciphered from that sheet that arrived in the envelope...

The letter sheets were another separate chapter. If it was common news, of a family nature, it was written on a white sheet, usually a page torn from a notebook. If it was a Valentine's letter, then it would be a little more elaborate. If it was the girl who was writing, the letter was usually sprinkled with her favorite perfume, so that her beloved would feel her presence when reading the message. And the sheet was all decorated, with drawings of hearts and other cute ornaments... sometimes, when money allowed, they bought sheets decorated with various motifs to use as a support for their messages. Hair locks and flowers used to be used for the boyfriend to always remember his beloved. Guys wrote real romances for girls, creating or copying poems praising the beauty of their chosen ones. And so the messages came and went, creating expectations that could or could not be met... because the content of the message would only be known after opening the envelope and reading the message...

It's eight hours and fifty minutes into this cloudy Saturday, where the thermometers mark 21ºC, with the possibility of reaching 30ºC during the day. However, if it rains...

Stay with God! See you tomorrow, if He so permits. And may He grant us the best Saturday we've ever experienced in our lives... kisses....