The Girls from Campinas

“The person who lives in your apartment,” Tiago Piccirilo tells us with evident pleasure, “will receive you at three in the afternoon.” The slim young man is escorting us across Praça Carlos Gomes, the historic square that holds the centre of Campinas, Brazil. He is the general manager of the Royal Palm Tower hotel, which stands directly across the praça from the Itatiaia, the building where we lived as children.

My sister and I have been in Campinas, a city of 1 million just inland from São Paulo, for less than 24 hours. For me, the trip is a birthday gift from my three sisters; the youngest, Ginny, has joined me on this excursion into the landscapes of our past. For 50 years, Brazil has been an unsettling memory, a piece in the mosaic that didn’t fit with our Canadian identity – its colours too bright, its patterns too bold. On the airplane here, my sister and I agree: We have unfinished business with our childhood selves.

Piccirilo is telling us how summer rainstorms periodically wash away the gardens in the praça and threaten to disrupt the swirling pattern of the red, black and cream cobbles. We try to listen, but we’re awash in a tsunami of our own. “Nothing has changed!” I whisper, gripping my sister’s arm. The park, the bandstand, the apartment building itself that faces the square, ringed with 127-year-old royal palms. I am seven again, watching fronds fall from a height with a dry, scraping crash, and peeling off the parchment to write stories to myself. My sister leans into me. She was two when we moved here from Canada; she did not expect to remember anything. “I see Mom everywhere,” she says, overcome. “This park was my backyard. I played here every day while you were at school.”

That morning, we’d gone looking for the Escola Americana de Campinas, back then a tiny house converted into a three-classroom school for the dozen or so children of English-speaking families living in the city when we arrived in 1957. Our fathers were all employed setting up branch plants for American manufacturers in a country known mostly for coffee, Carnaval, samba and soccer, especially since the 1950 FIFA World Cup in Rio de Janeiro put Brazil in the spotlight.

We walk away from downtown – past uniformed school children and feira stalls selling sliced star fruit, pastéis (deep-fried savoury snacks) and pão de queijo (cheese rolls) – up into Cambui, using memory as a map. I squint into houses converted into shops and offices, trying to imagine kids playing in the yard, me hanging back among the jaboticaba bushes, watching. Travelling as a child did that to me, turned me into a spectator, and I am watching still, but it is no use. In this part of the city, everything has changed.

Suddenly, there’s the regatta club where we swam every Thursday and, across the street, Nossa Senhora das Dores, with its dark wooden pews where I’d sit on my way home from school, cooling my feet from the searing pavement. Within minutes, we are at the house we moved into from the apartment. Or rather, where the house should be. Instead, there is a gap, a missing tooth in the curving smile of the street.

“The house at 877,” I ask the owner of a restaurant two doors down, “what happened to it? Wasn’t it good anymore?” I am speaking Portuguese, words I scarcely understand tumbling from my lips, though the rhythms have a comfortable feel to them, the singsong lilt of the sentences. “It was a good house,” the manager shrugs, “but not good for our purposes. We needed parking for the restaurant.”

We return to the empty lot and kick at the gravel, lackadaisically at first, then fanatically as squares of scuffed parquet emerge, then a smear of marble, a mosaic of pale green tile. The house is gone, but our foundations are still there.

The front of the Itatiaia is nondescript, a flat surface with slanted louvres above the windows to keep out the sun. At the kiosk guarding the entrance, Piccirilo explains our business and the guard buzzes us through. “At least this building is still standing,” I say. Piccirilo looks shocked. “It will never be torn down,” he says. “This is an Oscar Niemeyer.” Niemeyer! The architect who designed many of the iconic buildings in Brasilia, the capi­tal that Brazil raised in the middle of the country and that opened to the public in 1960, the year we moved into the house on Silva Telles street.

Piccirilo introduces us to José Carlos, a psychologist and writer who has been living in our apartment for 20 years. “Many people who used to live here come to visit, and they all call this ‘our’ apartment,” José Carlos laughs. “I suppose it is truly ‘ours.’ It belongs to all of us.”

We move tentatively about the rooms. They are exactly as I remember them. Only the view has shifted. The palms, at our feet 50 years ago, stretch to the 12th floor. We looked out on the bandstand then as we do now, and my eye still follows the flight paths of the parakeets.

It isn’t until we leave the apartment and walk around to the back of the Itatiaia that we are convinced the building is Niemeyer’s. The rear facade flares like a woman’s hip. “I am not attracted by straight angles, nor by straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man,” Niemeyer once wrote. “I am attracted by free-flowing, sensuous curves. The curves I find on the mountains of my native land, in the sinuous course of its rivers… and on the body of the beloved woman.”

That curve has settled into us, softening the sensible angles of the country where we were born. We feel it in the dangling palm leaves, in the red flamboyante blooms, in the movement of the samba beat and those vowels that come from high in the nose – a curve that is part of us. It’s how we know we’ve come home. 

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