IN THE SERRA DA MANTIQUEIRA

 IN THE SERRA DA MANTIQUEIRA

In the Serra da Mantiqueira

Under the mango frond

That when she was young she saw planting

Sitting on your bench

braiding white hair

Mother Mary will dream

 

(Ary Kerner Veiga DeCastro)

 

When I was a kid, every morning I woke up to the chords of this song. I always thought she was pretty. Even because it was the orchestrated version. And every morning, at five o'clock or half past five, I'm not sure (with time memory fades some details) a program would start on Radio Nacional with the title of this song… “Na Serra da Mantiqueira”… When did they start? the first chords of the song…my God, I was traveling through space… it was too beautiful. Of course, the station only played this verse of the song, so I had no idea how sad the lyrics of this song were… and I had no idea what it was really about. The only thing I knew was that it was named after my family's place of origin… the Mantiqueira Mountains…

Both my father’s and my mother’s family came from that region of São Paulo… I myself am from that region… after all, Taubaté, my city, is very close to the foot of the mountains… oh, yes, I am from the Paraíba Valley… My paternal grandparents lived in the mountains, really. The maternal grandparents already lived in the Valley, but always close to the mountains...

I loved visiting my grandparents... it was so good to be there, in the middle of that immensity that was the Valley and the Mountains. Truth be told, I liked the place because it wasn't very different from where I used to live, here in São Paulo. The topography of the places was very similar, at least for me. I know that someone will say “São Paulo is a plateau, not a mountain range…” well, actually the hills and mountains that form the Planalto Paulistano… after all, we have Serra da Cantareira, Serra do Mar… topography of the place is similar to that of the cities in the interior…

My maternal grandparents always lived in the Paraíba Valley, working on the plantations at the foot of the Serra… among the various places they worked, the rice farms were the most beautiful… in fact, I almost drowned in a rice plantation, can you believe it? Well, when the rice harvest is near, the blocks are flooded, and the ditches are quite deep. To walk from one block to another, comrades usually use a wooden log as a bridge. One day when we went to visit my grandparents, they were working in the rice field. And my mother decided to go see them at work. I was about five years old, more or less. When we were going to cross from one block to the other, I slipped and fell into the ditch. My aunt grabbed me by the hair and saved me from drowning...

What I thought was beautiful in the interior was, above all, the waterfalls… the waterfalls… the rivers that cut the meadows were beautiful… and all of this was familiar to me, because the region where I live was all cut by streams and mines. 'water that flowed into the dam that is close to my house. Yes, I still live close to the dam, so I still have the privilege of having green around me. I don't have as much green as I'd like, but I have more than most people can enjoy. The edge of the dam still has trees, where birds still make their inn. It is quite true that, for some time now, the number of vultures has increased a lot… but that is the fault of the dispatches that insist on doing it at the edge of the water…. By the way, if the people didn't insist so much on dirtying the banks of the dam with their offerings, the place where I live would be the most beautiful place on earth... anyway...

Well, but I started talking about the song and, suddenly, I completely changed the focus… as a child, I never imagined that the theme of this song was the clash between São Paulo and the Union… as a matter of fact, at that time I didn't even know that São Paulo had one day gone on a war footing against the Federation… and even when I entered school, and started to learn the history of Brazil, even when we were given notions about what the Constitutionalist Revolution would be, it took me a long time to connect the dots . This was partly because I didn't know the lyrics to the entire song… and I was never curious to know either… after all, the opening verses were enough for me to dream… imagine how scared I was the first time I heard the whole song and realized that in the end, the soul of Mother Mary's son, who died in the confrontation with the loyalist troops, comes to warn his mother that soon she too will go to the land of her feet together…. Well, then I thought she was a bit creepy… anyway…

When I was a teenager, my grandparents were elderly and could no longer maintain the pace required to work in the fields…. And they got a job as caretakers on a farm… wow, how I loved visiting them on that farm… first because, as soon as I arrived, my grandfather would go to the mango tree to fetch fresh milk for me… the milk was warm… it was delicious ! Then there was the orchard, where I enjoyed the various types of fruit planted there. And the garden… those fresh vegetables, picked at the moment to be part of the meal… wow, it was simply delicious… of course, from time to time, you would come across a snake or another…but they were not at all interested in interacting with us... and each one went their own way...

Once, when I was walking around the farm, I saw a duck with her little babies… I couldn't resist and ended up picking one of them up… it was so cute… but I ended up letting go of the little animal, because what was I going to do with it? He would certainly be better off with his mother and brothers…

Ah, yes, one of the nicest places to see was the thuja, where they let the coffee beans dry in the open air… it was a very large space, with a tarp covering the entire floor, and the coffee spread over this tarp. From time to time they needed to stir the grains, so that they dried evenly...

The interior was very beautiful. The green as far as the eye can see, the mighty rivers meandering through the meadows, the trees spreading their intoxicating perfume... the birds in their beautiful flights... of birds… it was a very, very beautiful thing indeed! In the morning, when the birds came to announce the day that was dawning, it was something from another world. Of course, when you're living in the moment, you don't have the exact dimension of the beauty of what's happening around you. Only a long time later, when the memory makes you relive moments lived, do you understand how much you were graced with something that most people don't even imagine exists. Even because every experience is unique, and each person has a different view of what happens around them. Example: - a movie theater, where the seats for the audience were boxes of tomatoes…but that didn't take away from the beauty of the film… something so nice, where people were so comfortable, that the fact that there were no chairs in the hall didn't make the slightest difference. What mattered was fun. I watched a movie in this cinema. The film could only be Mazzaroppi's, of course. I still remember the title of the film… it was “A Carrocinha”. It was very funny. That day it was the whole family… me, my father, my mother, my little brother, my aunts and my grandparents. It really was a really fun session. Cinema in the countryside was something else…

At the time of the cinema episode, my grandparents had just moved to the town of Eugênio de Melo, in São José dos Campos. So my father went to see his childhood friends who lived in the region. Wow, walking along that dirt road, surrounded by all that greenery, was simply delicious. The train line ran the length of the village, and the station was very close to the house where my grandparents lived. By the way, that day we went back to São Paulo by train… it was a different experience, because until then we only traveled by “Pássaro Marron”…

Traveling by train was fun, but time consuming. A trip that, by bus, took a maximum of two hours, took much longer, but the view provided during the journey was simply spectacular... the only drawback was that the wagons were overcrowded, like city buses at rush hour... and we stopped at a very different place than what I was used to… the end of the trip was at the Brás station, far from the Luz station, where the bus station was located. But the different ride was worth it… at least for the kids, as I think the adults were too tired to say they really enjoyed the trip…

After all, taking care of the bags and keeping an eye on two small children, on a crowded train, which stopped all the time… not considering that they were standing for a good part of the journey… well, it wasn't an easy task, let's face it. “But why were the adults standing on the train?” Simple… the trip took a few hours, the carriage was second class and the adults simply could not sit for long on those wooden benches, very different from the padded seats on buses…

Yes, it was really nice to travel to my grandparents' house… and when we were at our house, which as I've said several times, wasn't that different from where they lived, when we heard the notes of “Na Serra da Mantiqueira” at dawn, I remembered the mountains, streams and waterfalls that surrounded my grandparents’ home… and the desire to go back there, walking among the rice fields, came back strong and firm… but of course it happened a while until we could visit them again…

It's 7:15 am on this beautiful, sunny Thursday... the day promises to be very pleasant, with a mild temperature... right now the thermometers are showing 20ºC, but the forecast is for it to reach 29ºC... and it might rain in the afternoon...

May God pour the blessing of Heaven on our heads and grant us the most beautiful of all the Thursdays we've ever lived... see you tomorrow, God willing...