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In the early fall of 1956, the first day of the new school year, I was told by my first-grade teacher in Montreal that we would be moving to Brazil. That evening, sitting with my mother in the kitchen in our apartment on Sherbrooke Street, my older brother Derek and I learned that in Brazil we were going to have to drink bottled water. We were not to drink from the taps, we could get typhoid. Often, late at night in our apartment in Copacabana, more truly thirsty than truly frightened, I did, and survived. In that early era in Brazil I would awaken each night for several weeks and look at the small and ominous helicopter that had, somehow, landed in our bedroom in the dark, and was poised, motionless but menacing, on a chair a few feet from my bed, and I was afraid.
It was in those years that Walter – before he became Senhor Valter, not to be gainsayed — began to decree his bedrock if unarticulated belief, his unpronounced sine qua non, that we suddenly became one large and happy family. North and South. A belief in place of anyone’s memory, including his own.
But memory will persist in weaving other stories.
What story led from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties?
In one enduring form, it remains their love story.
Or, it was my mother’s story, alluding, darkly, to my father’s gambling addiction. That was the wedge. Senhor Valter was either silent, or allowed that in those years, my mother was pursued by “half of Montreal.” Which made him the victor.
My father never said a word to anyone. He had no story to tell. He did tell me several times, when I was in my early twenties, of the six months he had spent living with his parents in their house on Elm Avenue (pronounced in his generation as Ellum Avenue) at one unidentified time in his adult life. He told me he hadn’t wanted to leave the house. It took me decades to understand his Morse Code, to understand that he had retreated from the world when he was left.
There were other stories from the mid to late forties. One recounted a note on a windshield on Sherbrooke Street, advising the wronged Judith that her husband was at that moment in a nearby hotel room with the other Judith.
None of these accounts stood up. All of them stood up.
In one telling, it is their love story. I have labored but failed to apprehend it from the real love letters they wrote each other, sequestered by Dona Judite in Rio, in an old worn blue suitcase I discovered in her condo there a year before she died in 2003. I have further assembled the love story from a black and white photograph that I stole then from that suitcase, of Senhor Valter and Dona Judite at a rooftop restaurant in Montreal, named and dated on the back in blue ink, in my mother’s immaculately regular handwriting: The Normandie Roof, May 1944. Before their marriages to others.