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March. New buildings just appeared with few years of interval, three, four years.
The simple hotel also appeared with the engines, I can say that it only happened
after there were roads to Campos too, just after the small bus of Chico Peres, with its
four little seats where there was space for only three people. Before that time there was
an extraordinary silence, it was possible to talk softly for a long time without being dis-
turbed – except by a child’s crying in its own house.
Songs, this stuff too trivial nowadays that usually makes us bored and even
irritate us, could only be sung by the “technicians” – extremely rare, real treasure! So, the
singing of a bird was appreciated, and even the noise of the wind in any breach of a door,
or window, was enjoyed. Deep in my heart I have the slightly musical groans of the bullo-
ck carts that everyone think that are unbearable nowadays – the few ones that, not every
day, used to cross the sandbank, usually carrying firewood, and whose song, written in
so poor musical notes, was possible to be heard far away, so far away...
Even the croak of the frogs at the end of the long rains were songs... Everything
was like this. The moonlight! What moonlight can really happen with public light? The
moonlight at that time was a mystical fascination! It was endless, complete. For the cur-
rent visitors (Renato, for instance) these charms will make them laugh for their slender-
ness. They will think it was poverty. However, all siblings, not only me, enjoyed a lot that
very simple Grussaí. It was a content of life very different from the life here in the city, a
difference much bigger than the one there is nowadays, and this had a special taste, that
half rusticity. It was like we were in another world, that wild lifestyle in which, unless the
head of the family who sometimes came back to Campos, we all stayed there for two
months, and we didn’t miss the city – I say we, the kids.
There were too many other places to ride a horse because many properties we-
ren’t fenced, so we could get into them without asking for permission. We used to go
there to pick up some wild fruit, which only could be found there – almécegas, quixabas,
bacuparis, ingás-mirins, that the adults didn’t give any importance, and because of that,
weren’t sold at the doors by the native people, as they used to do with the watermelons,
cashews and big ingás.
As the home light was too precarious, we used kerosene, we had dinner by the
sundown, about four thirty, five o’clock in the afternoon – which had its own charm. Ri-
ding back from the Restinga, we used to drink some tea while having a short familiar talk,
although we were already asleep. And what a wonderful sleep, having a pervasive small
cricket in any corner of the bedroom, the wind noise on the roof and far away the huge
cry of the sea...