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I recall now the phone calls at the end of certain afternoons of certain summers some years ago: "Come here, quick! Something good's gonna happen today." And in the glassed-in studio of the house high up in the Jardim Botânico neighborhood was the explanation: it was a good day for watching the the capuchin monkeys up in the jackfruit trees, eating their fruit. And I also remember a Sunday in 1976, in another house, in Leblon. I asked him if he knew exactly why he played the piano. He thought for a moment and answered in a low voice: - I think it's so I won't die, so I won't disappear, so I won't just become a number. Not to go crazy, to run away. He stared at the floor, smiled and added: - I also believe that I play the piano to kill myself. |
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I remember the nine or ten years of lazy Friday lunches at the Plataforma . Our confabulations spun around the world. And suddenly he would recite the Brazilian Parnassians poets, but sometimes he skipped them all and just dwelt on Manuel Bandeira, smiling and saying "That's it, my friend, we, the lovers of Bandeira..." And there was a day that he finished a sentence, looked at the ceiling, and started to sing a song, "Bom Tempo," and then said: "How wonderful"! I don't know why I am remembering all this now, but suddenly I also recall the amazement of my son Felipe, who was about twelve at the time, watching Tom patiently, carefully explain to the waiter about how to finely chop spinach and then sauté it. Ending his explanation, he turned to Felipe and warned him in a firm, grave, low voice: - "You know, Felipe, they love to fool us and put margarine all over everything. But kale - it has to have butter." |
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I remember his rather awkward gait, his always mischievous ways, and how his face would light up roguishly when he was about to say something naughty. I also remember a worn, bulging leather shoulder bag, and the cigars and the Panamá hat. I remember his ability to spin theories out of thin air and then defend them with scientific rigor. I remember his fear when someone or something threatened his sacrosanct right to be left in peace. |
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I remember that every Saturday, about one in the afternoon, he would show up at our table at the Cobal in Leblon. He found this Saturday ritual especially amusing, and thought it absurd that other human beings habitually committed the incongruity of going to a market place smack in the middle of a Saturday to buy their fruit and vegetables, when everybody knows that markets were made for friends to have a proper place to drink in peace. |
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I remember his hands, the fingers a bit clumsy yet able to play the keyboard in an unusual way and embroider the most unexpected and superb harmony. He put all the notes together like someone gathering together every Brazilian soul in one single melody, which in fact never was one: it was all of them.
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Finally and forever, I remember that, just after noon of a Friday, Fernando de Morais called me from São Paulo saying: "Tom is dead." And after that I called Edu, Chico, Callado, and told my son, and suddenly I felt that everyone had absolutely nothing to say to anyone. So I stopped calling and wrote this that you have just finished reading and walked out into the rain. A December rain, no doubt, but one that made that Friday wake up looking like Fall. What I don't want to remember in any way is that there is a row of Saturdays waiting for me. And I don't want to remember, not now, not ever, that no one can give me back my remaining Saturdays, that are now mutilated, in the same way that my calendar, my time are mutilated because there is a row of Saturdays waiting for me and all of them without Tom.
(1994)
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Eric Nepomuceno is a writer and a journalist. English translation: Teresa Abucham
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