Roque Ehrhardt de Campos
Sometime between 1964 and 65, when I was just over 20 years old, I associated myself with a Chilean and we bought a gas station in partnership, here in Campinas, SP, where I was born, grew up and still live today.
This Chilean, with whom I was a partner, brought another fellow countryman from Chile, Juan Navaja, (not his real name, because could easily be spotted in Chile) who was perhaps 20 years older than me and had supposedly joined the partnership as well. Chile was experiencing a very difficult period of Allende, who wanted to socialize the nothing that Chile was and that would be the perfect “nothing for everyone” that characterizes the only possibility of communism…
We worked like beavers for almost two years to realize that it was a trap, because our partner deceived us.
I got away from the business and Juan Navaja was literally up in the air, leaving soon after me. As he lived with his compatriot, he moved to a boarding house, and the basic problems of survival, such as having a place to stay, eat, washing and ironning clothes, etc., became a nightmare, as he came to Brazil to try doing some business and he ended losing all his money.
Juan was an extremely fine and educated man and very well prepared, an engineer by training and profession. I felt sorry for him, and brought him to my parents’ home environment, until he could move on something. He was so grateful for my gesture that he showed me a letter from his compatriot in which he reported unequivocally that he had joined with me just for the money and intended to discard me. He ended up dismissing both of us and didn’t give us back what we invested in cash, instead, he gave us two old cars, a 1935 Ford and a 1948 Wolseley and some promissory notes. I got the Wolseley and he got Ford.
The cars were in pretty bad shape, and mine, the Wolseley, didn’t even run. It was a very complicated English automobile, with everything different from the average standard of things that existed here in Brazil.
Juan was very skilled and we literally built the part that prevented the car from moving in my parents’ kitchen, much to my mother’s horror. His car, the Ford 35, had a serious upholstery problem and Juan had the unusual idea of painting the upholstery using a spray gun. It turned out incredibly good.
That period was characterized by what we did with the rubbish we received from the rogue partner to recover what we had put into the business.
Finally Juan got a ticket back to Chile from his former partner and I went to Viracopos, who was international airport at the time, and said goodbye to him there.
I never saw or talked to him again.
About 30 years later, in 1995, I was working at Mercosul, and found myself in Santiago, capital of Chile.
With the weekend free, I looked over the phone book and found a lot of Navajas, but no Juans.(His family is spread and wealthy and this is not his name)
I called one Navaja who seemed important to me and he was the Director of Volkswagen Chile, who was moving into the country.
His secretary located Juan, who was a distant relative of her boss, and he was living in Viña Del Mar, Chile’s main harbour, two hours away from Santiago. I phoned him, identified myself to his daughter, who was extremely nice and set up a meeting, telling me how to get there.
Over the weekend, I rented a car and went there.
I don’t know Sweden, Denmark, Norway, but I know Hamburg, which is close to these icy places and Viña Del mar is the perfect Nordic environment, including the ice floating in the freezing water, which is observable in the sea that hits the harbour of Santiago in the winter, the season we were living in.
As soon as I arrived, I saw an old man, who seemed to be between 70 and 80 years old, (I was at that time 50) and when I approached, I recognized the Juan who had lived with me in that very painful period.
The experience of time starts now.
We went to his house and his wife, visibly worried, had prepared us a fantastic breakfast, since I had left Santiago early and it was not yet 9 o’clock and in that region, the day starts at 9.
We sat down and started talking and, incredibly, our imagery completely went back to the period when he left Brazil.
Everything that referred to that time, from the piece he built for the Morris Wolseley, as he recalled, the Ford upholstery painting, the problems of each of the people of the time, in short, a number of details that sounded like it had just happened . The degree of detail that emerged in this conversation was chilling. Not only from him, but from me as well. We go back 30 years ago, as if in a trance!
We were interrupted by his daughter, who submitted me to a real questionnaire, as this time Juan spent in Brazil was a total mystery for the family. Apparently, they imagined that he could have created another reality here in Brazil by leaving his family in Chile. I concluded that his marriage was also in crisis during the period he was in Brazil and that the separation repaired the relationship that straightened out and endured for many years until that moment. This adventure of mine looking for him so many years later brought to his wife the peace she never had after the period he ventured to leave his country and come to ours.
An amazing thing happened when I started to pay attention to his house, which was excellent. I saw Juan younger as I had known him in the hanging photos, back in the 70s, with General Pinochet siding several trams similar to the trolleys I had just saw in Geneva, Switzerland, where I came from to Chile and where I went several times because of the Mercosur business I got involved with working for the government.
I found it very strange and asked what it meant.
He reassured me that his relationship with Pinochet were purely commercial, as it was already known that General Pinochet was what he was.
What happened when he returned from Brazil was that Pinochet staged a coup and decided to bring progress to the country.
One of the serious problems was the lack of decent public transportation.
This happened a few years after Juan returned from Brazil. Pinochet took over to rule the country and liberalized the economy. Among other things, he put up a bidding, to bring from Geneva and other cities in Switzerland a generation of trolley trams that were being discontinued for its use in Chile. These trolley buses would run for a long time before being replaced, as Pinochet had gotten them at a very cheap price, but it was needed to bring them from there, repair, install, run and maintain the service.
Juan, with the adventurous and limitless spirit that characterized him, entered the competition and won…
I was simply in front of one of the owners of the public transportation in Santiago and Valparaiso…
Juan, with the same skill which he hand built that part of the Morris and made it run, fixed the 1935 Ford, he rebuilt the Swiss trams, assembled everything, had them to run properly and competently was in charge of a part of the public transportation services of Santiago and Valparaíso…
He became a rich man…
We said goodbye, thunderstruck with the experience of remembering those bitter and difficult times we spent together and never saw each other again.
His daughter could not conceal her relief and could not hide the joy of scaring away ghosts of her father’s time in Brazil.
I’m sure that movie that passes before us when we die is exactly what happened to me that day…
Second experience
I stayed in the United States from mid seventies to early eighties, on several trips and spent most of the time upstate New York, more precisely in Endicott.
We arrived in the region in 75 and left in July 1983 on two trips and it coincided with the period of my children growing up, as they were born in 70, 72 and 76.
They grew up there and, of course, were constant companions wherever we went.
In 1995, the same year I had that experience with Juan in Chile, I decided to visit Endicott, with my wife.
More than 15 years had passed and the region is a group of 3 or 4 cities, as if it were Campinas, Valinhos, Vinhedo, Jundiaí, here in Brazil, where I live, but spread out and relatively difficult to get around without knowing where you are going.
I rented a car in New York and went there, taking my chance.
We were deeply concerned, as we remember that when we arrived in the region, it was difficult to put together a mental map and walk freely, .
When you arrive from NY, getting close to Endicott, at the entrance to the city, there was and still is, a bakery where we stoped, after a tiresome travel, hungry and thirsty, especially with children.
Roma´s Bakery. I will never forget the name.
We parked, got in and the first surprise was to find everything exactly in the same place.
It was a family of Italians and the people from our time were there, older, surrounded by their children, maybe grandchildren. You could see their blood on their facial expression and everything, but everything, including the types of sandwiches, which they call submarine in the United States, were there, as we knew years ago.
We chilled scared down after I asked the sandwich I liked, my wife asked hers and we had the impulse to ask something for the boys, because we had the feeling that they would run in, as they always did.
We sat down remembering the uneasiness we felt with the boys, especially the two younger ones, caused on us, as they did not reach the table and hung around waiting to reach a snack and a drink. They also had a habit of poking around the candy vending machine and I even got up and went to take a look and see if they weren’t up to something, so intense was the memory. We live a 1978 moment in 1995…
The second surprise was more subtle, as we took the car, I automatically went everywhere I wanted and everything appeared as if by magic, because the mental map had been engraved in my subconscious and it seemed that I had never left the place.
Those Americans who looked at us as strangers could never understand the dismay we were taken to relive such a laborious and grateful period of our life there in that place….
Man & Time J B Priestley 