A LOVE STORY, A FILM AND A FEW FEARS ABOUT THE FUTURE
(Warning: Sometimes I just can’t help but talk politics)
Photo by Samuel Costa Melo on Unsplash
A century ago two young people met and fell in love in Brazil, a continent away from their homes — his in Texas, hers in Virginia.
The story was that he’d been standing with a friend on a Porto Alegre hillside, watching the arrival of a ship full of newcomers that included a few fellow educational missionaries like themselves. And that he spotted her, a slender young woman with auburn hair woven in thick braids around her head, and said to his companion, “Saunders, I’m going to marry that girl if it’s the last thing I do.”
We had our own opinions about that story — my three older sisters and I — but we learned to smile politely and just let him tell it. The girl in question, who had come to teach music and folk dance to preschoolers, would answer our derision with her own smile and the response, “Well, that’s what he says . . .” Which may explain their long and happy union.
Remembrances are heart-warming; but reading about Brazil today can be scary.
“I’m Still Here,” the award-winning film by Director Walter Salles, has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, with leading lady Fernanda Torres, 59, up for best actress and generating talk about the Oscars. All this follows a failed bid, a quarter-century ago, by Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro for the best-actress Oscar that went to Gwyneth Paltrow.
As I’m not much of a movie buff, what I know about I’m Still Here is mostly what I read in the New York Times: “Set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s,” writes reporter Ana Ionova, the film “tells the story of Eunice Paiva and her five children, whose lives are upended when the family patriarch, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman played by Selton Mello, disappears at the hands of the military government.” Ionova quotes director Salles as saying “The personal story of the family is the collective story of a country.” And this is what, to me, is scary.
My family returned to the U.S. for good in the mid-1930s, when I was not yet two (yes, I’m sailing into my 90s now) and the winds of war were stirring around the globe.
Brazil, though, was forever my parents’ happy place, Portuguese the language they spoke to each other all their lives. They had been young enough to believe their schoolrooms were helping make the world better. Porto Alegre featured free opera and symphony in the city center, and they made lifelong friends whom I often met in later years. Though the politics of the country were tumultuous — my parents were friendly with the good-guy/bad-guy leader Getúlio Vargas (whose roots were in Porto Alegre’s state of Rio Grande do Sul) — those were joyful years for my family.
What I remember about my father’s politics — other than his policy disagreements with Ronald Reagan, whom he dismissed as “that cowboy in the White House” — was his ferocious opposition to any electorate that handed too much power to one man. He had watched the worst example of that with the rise of the Third Reich (born the same year as I) and had worked against more than one U.S. politician who had authoritarian inclinations in the last half of the 20thcentury.
The political forces behind the troubled 1970s of Brazilian politics were concentrated in a military junta (supported by the U.S.) rather than a single person; but I remember my father’s sorrow over what happened to freedom and democracy there, and his joy when the dictatorship fell and democracy was restored. He was then in his mid-eighties; he would go on to live, active and engaged, into his 90th year.
My father did not live to know Jair Bolsonaro, who aspires to be dictator of Brazil, and whose supporters stormed the capitol when he lost his last attempt to reach that goal. But I think I know what he’d have to say about Bolsonaro and friends.
I have beloved friends and family members who voted, in the recent U.S. elections, for the not particularly truthful or generous man who has said he would be dictator “on day one,” who demands absolute loyalty, and has been given extraordinary power in advance by the courts that he put in place. I claim no superior knowledge and do not question the many reasons why they, and a slim majority of my fellow citizens, chose to send him back to the White House.
But still. The spirit of my father is omnipresent these days. I remember the loss of democracy in Brazil that I’m Still Here is bringing to light once again. And I know enough about autocracies not to want to live under one.
