Rolando's Journey

A journey in Brazil,

Rolando Vázquez

This are the pages of a travel diary. You are welcome to enter its images, its reflections. The order in which they appear is arbitrary, there is no order. You choose how to read, how to see.

Note

The project. Rio de Janeiro. Sao Paulo, mirage city. Ronie's birthday. The march towards the "West". We  reached the Iguazu falls. The Missions. Paraguay  Sky. Night  in an Amazonian Boat. In a religious ceremony at Sao Bento. Nature. Brazil and modernity. 21 hours in a Bolivian Train. Latin America. Beauty. Rio the last day. Diversity. Guides. Travel and Knowledge. Walking. Silence. Tourism and Travelling. England. Our Brazil.

The project

The written history of Brazil often recalls the seventeenth century Bandeiras as expeditions in search of slaves and riches. The Bandeira of Raposo Tavares, well known for its far reaching geographical exploration of the inner lands, was meant to be the historical map for our journey in the vast Brazilian territory.

Even with the project in hand the idea of the Bandeira remained for me highly intangible. Did the Bandeiras really existed?

The day we arrived to Rio, we had an interview with two historians, Margarida and Ilmar. It was the start of the exploration beyond the guide and the history books.

I felt an immediate relief, when I heard in their Portuguese speaking voices the sound of "Bandeiras". They do exist!

This first dialogue, was to open a crucial insight for our journey. Margarida maid clear that the material achievements of the Bandeiras, in what comes to slave trade or mine discoveries, were far from being as relevant as they were in the symbolic construction of the geographical and political unity of Brazil.

From day one, the historical presence of the Bandeiras, was to express itself not as a historical fact but as a mineral suffused in the bedrock of the Brasilian National identity. We found ourselves in a territory where the bandeiras were not to be traced back in books but in their breathing presence. Today the bandeiras continue to leave their traces in the language of the cities, in the naming of the public spaces, in the streets, avenues, car brands, boat names, motorways? The bandeira was all around us, silent in the Brazilian imaginary.

Rio de Janeiro

Rio is an explosion of forms. Nature and urbanism are melted together: plants, trees, architecture, buildings and rocks, waves in the see and in the side walks.

The main square of Rio is the beach.

Beach,

public space,

sun, sand, skins,

the sea

perpetual movement,

games and seduction,

Buildings mirroring mountains,

in our eyes

the city spreads

enfolding us.

Sao Paulo, mirage city.

Sao Paulo, a world-city, it reminds me Mexico city, my home town.

Rio where buildings try in vain to supersede the mountains and hide the see, is left behind. In Sao Paulo, the buildings are grey cordilleras, endless landscape. Here it is, the gigantic Brazil, the creature of concrete and dry angles, the metro, the edifices, the avenues, the museums? wide desert of modernity.

Sao Paulo

Sao Paulo,

Ciudad que se levanta

stepping on roads

sobre caminos de conquista y lucha

of conquest and fight,

Ciudad magnética,

magnetic city,

asphalt sucker.

Ventosa de asfalto.

The symbols of history breath more through the powerful world-citizen, the paulista, the renewed Brazilian, than through the few old facades that crumble in between large constructions.

The old-time houses and streets  have ceded their space to the new and entered into the debris of history. Even the churches stand where previous churches were. San Bento, here stood a XVI C. church, Se Square, here stood another cathedral.

However some how the Iron viaduct, now a pedestrian street, survived. Probably, it was left untouched because of its value as an early symbol of the very idea of modernization which strives to replace it all, in the name of the utopia of progress.

The pedestrian centre of Sao Paulo, always burgeoning, seems to be a neural-space where all the nerves of the urban body collide and explode into avenues, cars and cement.

People, like in any other metropolis, walk as if they were being pursued by the consumption of their own time.

Cross through the city,

vast abyss of cement,

the city continues, unending,

impracticable labyrinth.

Ronie's birthday

Today, is Ronie's birthday. He is a friend that works at the eatery in front of the hotel, where we have had supper since we arrived to the city, two days ago. He invited us to go with his family, wife and daughter to a very special place for dinner, where Brazilians go. He told us: "you will like it".  After commuting, an hour and a half, or so, we finally arrived. There it is, the newest and largest mall in Sao Paulo: Shopping Morumbi.

Suddenly we were back in our world of global consumption. But being with Ronie, everything was so different. He was unable to acquire any of the goods on show, the mall was not a shopping place but just a nice place to be, to walk around, to wander.

[In a Brazil with a shattering energetic crisis.]

Amid an energetic crisis,

a country that is immerse in penumbras,

the Shopping of Morumbi,

the desire city, gleams in the dark.

Lights and mirrors,

aesthetic show

of desire and deprivation.

In a nation-wide effort to save electric energy, the night stadium lights of the beaches in Rio are turned off. All the public spaces are in the dark. However, the malls, the public that is private, keeps the simulacrum running.

The march towards the "West".

"The real sense of the brasilidade is in the march towards the West" Freyre

Rio and Sao Paulo, are behind us. We are following our route towards the inner lands. The dozens of hours sited in buses are time which tells us about the distance, as it was for the first explorers.

Rivers, bodies of water remind us of their importance for the early travellers. The rivers where a reference point, a guide and a root to go or come-back.

We reached the Iguazu falls

Iguazu,

supreme nature,

moment of metamorphosis,

clear water turns into movement,

forms and light,

colours and rupture.

no more words to say

The Missions

We crossed the border towards Trinidad in Paraguay. We are in search of the Jesuit missions just as Raposo did.

At the sight of the ruined missions it becomes crystal clear why the Jesuits were expelled from the colonial territories. In their settlements the Jesuit's had an alternative and highly successful system of production. The missions worked without slavery, based on indigenous communal work, hence they had forms of social stratification radically different from the systems of exploitation in plantations and mines of the colony. The Jesuit's settlement, were so prosperous that soon they reached a wealth and power which was seen as a major risk to the hegemonic power of the Portuguese and the Spanish empires.

Near Trinidad, the splendour of the Jesuit's missions remains visible in their ashes. In this ruins the linearity of history lays broken. The progress, the dreams, the utopia of future that were once contained among this walls, is now debris of nostalgia.

Paraguay Sky

Paraguay lays underneath immense skies,

Turning the eyes into the blue,

is entering a desert without horizons,

infinite.

Night in an Amazonian Boat

Full Moon in paper,

Luna,

waters remembered,

Llenas el papel,

without voice I receive,

recuerdas las aguas,

No one,

Te recibo sin voz,

speaks better about you

Quién mejor habla de ti,

than the paper in white.

es la hoja en Blanco.

Aquí

Here,

somos agua,

we are water,

luna,

moon,

silencio.

silence.

Encounter of immensity,

Encuentro de inmensidad,

The totality shows

La totalidad

nothingness.

nos muestra la nada.

In a religious ceremony at Sao Bento

The Benedictines,

Los Benedictinos, el tiempo en el incienso, en el canto, repetición que respira, desde el barroco hasta el ahora.

time: incense and chants.

Repetition that breaths,

from the Baroque to the now.

Nature

With its grand modernity, Brazil the country of the big national projects has incubated cities in the deepest of nature's territories.

Witnessing the encounter between the green and the asphalt, we learn about modernity, about the transformation of space and time:

Brazil and modernity

Brazil,

Brasil,

order and progress,

orden y progreso,

incarnation,

encarnación, imagen

vivid image,

de la modernidad contradictoria, crecimiento y fractura.

of the aporia of modernity,

growth and fracture.

Nature's fragile but overwhelming permanence clashes with the cities, the projects of technological expansion. It unravels another temporality and teaches us the frailty of our modern consciousness.

In Brazil, the presence of nature talks to us about the continuity, permanence of the time that is not history.

21 hours in a Bolivian Train

Modernity is often seen as a tendency towards homogenisation, but I it is also fascinating to think of it in terms of a process of differentiation. The modern transformation of common life, the concatenation of multiple perceptions and experiences, the multiplicities of the modern can be scented everywhere, for instance in a Bolivian train and its temporalities.

The Train,

El tren,

Variable visages,

tiempo cambiante,

revolving times,

Rostros revolventes,

Visages of earth,

rostros de tierra,

of change and origin,

de cambio,

distances and eras.

de origen,

Visages sharing a wagon,

distancias y épocas

coming together,

que se tocan.

touching each other.

Latin America

In my mind, the journey implied some sort of a dialogue between Latin-Americans. A dialogue that only rarely takes place. We are going to a Latin-America that is unknown and plenty of mysteries. Has the Bandeira really existed?

After all Latin-America is not so alien, I know that it is the land in which the collision between progress and tradition has never stopped. The two faces of progress are always present: development and exclusion.

In the interior of Brazil one can see the encounter of times, the Latin-American multiplicity that intermeshes the now and the then, nostalgia and hope.

Beauty

Today, while I was staring at the river, a young man from the state of Para approached me and said: "Brazil is not so beautiful, behind the beauty there is poverty and sadness."

Rio the last day

Último día en Rio,

Brazil remains imbedded inside us,

Brasil se nos queda dentro,

with its suppurating modernity

con su modernidad supurante

of big projects, concrete and favelas.

de grandes obras,

concretos y favelas

Diversity

In the dialogue between the Brazilians and nature it seems that the astonishing variety in plants, animals and landscapes is largely surpassed by the multiplicity of faces, languages and human experiences.

Travelling, is an opportunity to enter into other everyday worlds, into other spaces and contemplate the diversity of our world.

Guides

Today's traveller, goes wandering with his guide under the arm. The guide transforms for him the unknown, the open, the world he is discovering into an intelligible reality. The guide becomes a machinery of interpretation. Through the guide, the experience of travelling becomes homogenised, blinded. The experience and understanding of the traveller enter the realm of the mass-produced, they are commodified.

Guides normalize our encounter with the unknown, they obscure the explosion of colours that is there to be seen. We have to allow the world in front of us to show.

Drop the Guide! or if you really need it for practicalities such as finding a street or a place to sleep, at the least laugh about its blindness, stop it from telling you how to see what you are already seeing.

We are used to perceive our reality in a familiar way. But if we access another reality, a reality that is alien to us, we ought to silence our daily language that is full of preconceptions, and just let us marvel, listen to the world. We ought to stop the habitual words, stop the interpretative noise and just be part of where we are.

Then other words come on their own and we awake to a different world, to an immense reality

A voyage can be an exercise of imagination, an emancipating experience in which our mind has the opportunity to escape the bounded reality in which we live.

Travel and Knowledge

Looking at other "western tourists", it occurred to me that the "fetishization" of travelling is related to the "fetishization" of knowledge. Travelling, many people says, including myself, is a way to knowledge.

However one has to distinguish among different kinds of knowledge. The kind of knowledge that is related to an insatiable thirst for empirical data, looks to me as an escape from reality in its endless search for detail. The visit of museums, memorials, monuments is like dissecting the real, is like looking only at fragments of a historical discourse.

The search for specificities obliterates the experience of the whole, of travelling as experience as an open window. Needless to admit, this reflection is an example of the incursion of frames of mind that obliterate the open experience which I am here supposed to be arguing for.

Walking

In any walk we are surrounded by the regular ordering of life. Everything is in place, and it looks as if it has always been like that. The pedestrians, the trees, the cars, the see, all is their as usual.

Nonetheless, when we arrive to an alien place it all appears as bursting with forms, rhythms, sounds; the reality ceases to be normal and we feel it breathing on us.

The day we started the trip, in our way to London, I kept in the memory the image of the train and the English landscape. I kept this image as anchor, a reference point to burst open the normality  and awake Brazil in the skin.

The image of the lived helps us to contrast and differentiate the normality of the places we visit. Whereas the guide with its familiar language tends to unify and normalize all what is different to our minds.

Silence

Every visage, every tree, every street ask us to keep silent. The voyage starts when we are able to be in silence, in the opening of the living diversity that surrounds us.

Silenciar la palabra que calla al mundo. Dejar que la palabra nazca, simple, cual destello de lo que es.

Close the speaking which silences the world.

Let the simple words born out of the shine of what there is.

Sometimes, solitude is the shape of our encounter with the world. When the world opens-itself unrestricted in its immensity silence is our spoken word.

En ocasiones la soledad es la forma que toma nuestro encuentro con el mundo. Cuando el mundo se abre sin restricciones en su inmensidad nuestra palabra es silencio.

Tourism and Travelling

Did we learn something of Brazil, with our mind in its history, in the national symbols, visiting the libraries, strolling the streets, contemplating the water, the sun?

I have no doubt, that I should say yes. But, I didn't learnt many specific things.

In front of another reality one can choose to read it with the glasses brought from home or let one-self flow in another real, in another reality which overtakes all our senses. While travelling one has the opportunity of understanding.

The words we brought with us to Brazil often threatened the reality around us, they were often misleading, blinding, like a dark silence. Our outsider's words were unable to dialogue with what was in front of us. Our own language seem to be deluding us.

Our luggage is plenty of anchors, just as our common language; the guides, the books, the money, the malaria pills, the insect repellent, all of it retains us home.

We have to silence our minds and allow the language of what is in front of us to growth, to emerge. In silence one suddenly sees how the gap between ourselves and the alien world, and the an immediate otherness, begins to succumb. Then what is alien begins to talk its language.

England

After Brazil, Britain, the home we left, became also a different, a unique place. How to ignore the presence of the warm colours and the flying leafs of the autumn, the rows of chimneys and red bricks, the green smell of British humidity and its quiet people?

Back home we realized that our everyday life had changed. The trip has grown in us and has expanded the boundaries of our understanding.

Our Brazil

Our Brazil,

Nuestro Brasil,

mirror,

espejo,

door to the earth,

puerta a la Tierra,

camino por América Latina.

path through Latin-America.

Aquí estamos,

We are here,

caminamos las aceras,

strolling side-walks,

caminamos nuestro ahora.

walking our now.

Nos sabemos despiertos

We are awaken

en un mundo inmenso,

immense world,

en medio de llamados,

of callings, blindness,

de cegueras,

and eternities.

de eternidades.

El encuentro con Brasil, fue ante todo un encuentro con nuestras vidas, con nosotros mismos.

Among all, the encounter with Brazil, has been an encounter with our live, with ourselves.

We carried a project. Futile to ask its relevance, or question its content, it is in itself a question.

Llevamos en nosotros un proyecto. Inútil preguntar su relevancia, o cuestionar su contenido, es en sí pregunta. Lo que tenemos andado lo llevamos dentro, cual viento íntimo que nos dirige, que nos impulsa. El viento de lo que fuimos nos mueve y a cada paso se renueva para seguir siendo movimiento de lo que hemos sido.

What we have walked is inside us, as intimate wind which guides and propels us in its flow.

At each step, the wind of what we have been moves us renewing itself to keep running the current of life.

The immensity of Brazil pushed us to our interior; trip of encounter, of renovation.