Sergio's Journey Part 2
	In a way, however, Brazil is a place to which no one can enter completely unawares. It exists already in most people?s imagination and in many people?s dreams before they have made it into the country. It has earned it. Brazil is dancing and merriment; wondrous nature and exuberant people; larger-than-life women and men fortunate enough to be with them; open land and endless seaside. Before they have gone, Brazil is what millions would often like their country to be like. This is why arriving there produces a strange sense of expectant deja-vu: around every corner one expects to find something one has tried to imagine. Brazil has also been, on the other hand, a land of profound social inequality, of persistent injustice and of great violence. This, too, one expects to find around every corner.
	The west towards which Raposo headed along the Tieté must have been shrouded with similar feelings of expectation for him and his men. There ahead laid the Sertão, the open land, no white man?s land. The Sertâo is not a place in the map, it is a part in the mind and heart of all Brazilians, and it has been so for five hundred years.
	In it ? and idea as it was and somehow still is ? were included all the myths of European exploration, from Atlantis to El Dorado. By the 1640s that European filling of the void must have been greatly enriched by the Tupi outlook to the world. That was certainly the case in São Paulo, where the Portuguese prided themselves in partaking in the Indian ways and where so many caboclos had sprung up out of the miscegenation of a marginal Iberian population and the Tupi civilization. The Sertão to which Raposo led his men was a dry Atlantis with American features, and it contained a Dorado made of silver, a second Potosí. And just as the sunken island of ancient Greek lore, the Brazilian sertão was imagined as an island.
	The Island of Brazil ? not a myth but a form of conceiving the unknown geography of the country ? was an idea that may have been partially inspired by Indian perceptions of the land they inhabited, but it also contained a Portuguese element. The Tupi and Gé Indians were used to great rivers, beside which one feels like by the sea. The Portuguese, thanks to their sailors and merchants, had a wide knowledge of coasts and of great expanses of sea, in the Indic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Moreover, the Portuguese merchant expansion had kept to the coasts, as was the case along the Western African coast ? especially in Angola -, Goa and Macao. Brazil was no exception to this pattern, and it was the coast and its immediate hinterland that was settled and put to use. The inland ? the Sertão ? was an island in at least in one sense: just like the whole Indian subcontinent was to Goa, the Brazilian Sertão was like a sea of otherness surrounding the Portuguese enterprise in America.
	In another sense, Brazil is transected by a series of great tributaries of the Amazon, all of them flowing from south to north and keeping generally parallel courses. These rivers became progressively known to the Portuguese, first as they went up the Amazon and later as they penetrated northwest from São Paulo. First the Tocantins, then the Araguaia, the Xingu, the Tapajos, eventually the Madeira; they would all take their turn at being the western confine of the imagined Island of Brazil. In yet another sense, the idea of a self-contained island that could be called Brazil meant the possibility of a redefinition of the Tordesillas line, by which in 1504 the Papacy had split America along an arbitrary meridian line, in the wrong assumption that it was only distributing the Caribbean islands between the two maritime powers. Once the continent began to be disclosed, it became clear that Portugal had received by far the smaller share, but also that most of the land west of the Tordesillas line was in fact no white man?s, as it laid both in the Amazon basin and the yet unexplored outback behind the Brazilian coast. The Island of Brazil, unlike all other islands, was an extension of land that could be stretched, and the way to do it was through exploration, submission of the inhabitant Indians and, eventually, war against Spain, whose domains laid across the sertão.
	The taxi ride from Galeão took us through Rio Norte and through the very inside of the Tijuca mountain range, right underneath the Redeeming Christ. Across the tunnel, Rio showed us another of its faces: the borough around the natural lagoon of Rodrigo de Freytas, by the name Lagoa. This was our destination because a friend was putting us up in his high rise flat. There our trip started with unexpected privileges. We were to spend a week in Lagoa, to the right hand of the Redeeming Christ, a 15-minute walk to Ipanema and right at equal distances from the Centre of Rio and the PUC, the university where we were to carry a great deal of our research. Paulo, our friend, received us with what we took to be the best of Brazilian hospitality and put us on the right track for the exploration of the Wondrous City, or rather, of its libraries.
	First in our priorities ? even at the expense of beaches and monuments ? was paying a visit to the first of our pre-established contacts in Rio?s Jesuit University, the PUC. There we had a long and enlightening talk with Margarida de Souza Neves and Ilmar Mattos, two very renowned Brazilian historians and most pleasant persons, as we were to learn. Their generosity could only be compared to that of Paulo, back in Lagoa. They greatly enriched our knowledge of the written tradition about the Bandeiras and introduced us to important concepts such as the Island of Brazil and the continued symbolic meaning of the bandeiras in Brazilian history. They confirmed us in our intuition that through the bandeiras a certain perception of the whole of Brazil is possible and sensible, and they gave us plenty of threads to follow, both in the libraries and with historian friends they know throughout the country. With their advice we were much better prepared to visit the National Library, and Margarida?s invitation to dine that night put us in yet another position of privilege to enjoy Rio.
	At the Café Gloria, amidst Art Deco pillars and the scents and flavours of Carioca cuisine, she talked to us with passion about her teaching, past and present, and with saudade about her years of exile in Belgium during the military dictatorship of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I trust she would not be upset if I were to imagine the years of her exile ? with their good and bad memories ? as yet another Brazilian Sertão. Europe as the sertão of the young Brazilian intellectual majority of those years, intent on radical social reform and at odds with the development project of the coroneis. Under milder circumstances, is not Europe a kind of Latin American sertão for us all, who come here to study and go back when we are done, a place where one comes full of expectations and imagination, where one lives with intensity and then leaves to go back to where one belongs?
	Raposo Tavares was among those who came back. Many of his men did not, but he made it after three years of loosing himself in the sertão. In fact, he did not so much loose himself, in the same way that the Brazilian outback was not just a mythical land and the expedition was not quite like Odysseus?s, a voyage at the mercy of the gods. The sertão may have bee shrouded with mystery but it was simultaneously conceived by powerful rulers and private entrepreneurs as the scenario of quite realistic grand projects. After 1640, the Portuguese Crown ? independent after 52 years of Hapsburg rule and free at last of Dutch interference in the Brazilian Northeast ? began to conceive of the construction of an American empire of its own in the manner of the Spanish one. The sugar economy had begun its decline now that the Dutch and the English were planting it in the Caribbean. As a response, the system of Sesmarías ? the twelve huge tracts of land allocated to high nobles in the sixteenth century, and by which the king divided his possessions along the coast of Brazil ? was to be transcended and expanded inland. The Crown?s aim was to consolidate a more varied economy and society and to put Brazil on a pair with colonial entities such as Mexico or Peru. For that, two items where required: silver and people ? or souls, as the conquerors and missionaries referred to the Indians.
	More than that, the war of liberation against mighty Spain ? carried out throughout the 1640s ? looked like a desperate cause to the smaller Crown of Portugal. Besides, it was being besieged simultaneously by Holland, to which it had lost Angola and the Brazilian Northeast. João IV and his advisors ? among who was the Jesuit Antonio Vieira ? devised a bold and desperate plan. They were to find a French regent for Portugal, the duke of Montpensier, for which purpose Vieira met Mazarin; Salvador Correia de Sá, governor of Rio de Janeiro and the king?s main military man, was to regain Angola; and Brazil was to be made a more integrated and richer polity where João IV could retire to rule until a definite peace was reached with Spain. For this, the definite appropriation of the lands beyond the Paraná was in the agenda, as well as the exploration for silver mines. Indian tales and legend had it that those mines were located in the upper Paraguay, where a golden lagoon and silver mines bigger than Cerro Rico in Potosí filled the explorers? imagination.
	On the fringes of the Portuguese presence in Brazil laid São Paulo, the least important of the Sesmarías in terms of revenue for the Crown, but one that precisely because of its isolation from the Atlantic trade system, had developed both an incipient internal economy and a culture of exploration and alternative enterprise. Instead of sugar export and the consumption end of the Angolan slave trade, Paulistas practiced subsistence agriculture and the raiding of the outback in the hunt for Indians to be enslaved and sold in the markets of Rio de Janeiro. Their exploits were directed inland from early times, as was the case only along the Amazon River, far north. But only the Paulistas had the bonus of christianised and reduced Indians not so far inland, as a result of the Spanish Jesuit missions of Paraguay among the Guaraní.
	Raposo Tavares had earned a reputation as a particularly bold raider of those missions, and with it the hatred of the Spanish as well as the Portuguese Jesuits.
	Moreover, at a time when the Crowns of Spain and Portugal where held together by the Spanish Habsburg Philip IV, Raposo?s activities in Paraguay where illegal, and a process had been opened against him in Rio de Janeiro in keeping with orders from Madrid. Throughout the 1630s he had made bold and profitable incursions against the missions of Itatim, near the Iguazu Falls, and Tapé and Guairá, in modern Paraguay. The exploration and eventual conquest of the Sertão was a bet on the future for the Paulistas ? at the time the only one they had if they were to grow to the size and importance of other regions like Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and Pernambuco ? and it all was at first a matter of private initiative.
	Antonio Raposo Tavares was one of those Portuguese adventurers who had ended up settling in São Paulo and chosen not to be yet another small planter of beans and maize. He was a raider and a soldier, and quite good at both professions. He had been a reliable purveyor of Indian slaves to the sugar plantations of Rio and eventually came to be in command of a Paulista group of men of arms who were to contribute to the war against the invading Dutch in the Northeast. There, in 1641, he was made a Field Marshal by the viceroy of Brazil, even at a time when he was been prosecuted by the Spanish Crown as a raider of the Jesuit missions. It is clear that what was a crime for the Spanish ultimately in charge, was a good deed for the extant Portuguese elements of governance throughout the 1630s. It was so much so that after the secession of the Crown of Portugal from Spanish rule in 1640 ? mediated by a harsh if short war in the peninsula - Raposo was summoned to Lisbon, where he was invited to the court. What the king said to his subject has never been documented. What is clear is that he came hack to São Paulo and that one year later he was leading his men West on the greatest adventure of his life.
	Much of this we learnt at the National Library in Rio. There, in its lofty and elegant rooms, we could read some works by Alfonse de Taunay of which we knew by reference, and, in keeping with the professors? advice, we became acquainted with Jaime Cortesão?s work on Raposo?s expedition. Among the first, we could see Taunay?s map on the Paulista entradas, which is the best generic term for sixteenth and seventeenth expeditions into the Brazilian outback (the term bandeira began to be used in the eighteenth century and only with reference to punitive expeditions against rebel Indians). This map is rigorously documented, in the sense that it includes only stretches or points of the routes that have been explicitly mentioned by historical accounts. This gave us a sketchy picture of Raposo?s route, but one that quite matched the one we had planned for our trip.
	Taunay also gave us an introduction to the Paulista historical understanding of the Entradas. That is, the very local perspective recurrently put to the use of the State?s identity, its political claims in the National context and the regional pride of the Paulistas. Jaime Cortesão, on the other hand, gave us the Iberian, European perspective, from which events in Brazil at the time of exploration and settlement are understood in terms of the intricacies of European courtly politics. We profited from both views greatly, but managed to keep our minds open to the possibilities afforded by Raposo?s expedition as a window into Brazil. After all, it was visions of Brazil that we were trying to put in our heads.
	In the National Library, moreover, we learnt three very important things about the Paulista explorations of the sertão. The first one: that it was by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth that they became important objects of history and memory, at first just for Paulistas. This awakened interest coincides with the onset of the Republic and the central role played by the state of São Paulo in it. This first wave of interest was able to reduce the legendary proportions of most of the colonial accounts of these expeditions and to make them readily usable in the more modern language of critical history. In this packed form, the Paulista Bandeiras ? only then metonymically renamed that way ? became the core of the nationalistic discourse of the fast-growing State of São Paulo, undertones of which myth are as strong today as they ever were.
	Second, that by the 1940s a new wave of interest in the Paulista expeditions arose among Paulista intellectuals in the context of the threatened political importance of São Paulo throughout Getulio Vargas?s Estado Nuovo.  As a coalition between the States of the south and Minas Gerais took pre-eminence in central politics, the Paulistas responded with a lost war, political play and an avalanche of regional discourse and Paulista cultural symbols. It was this new generation that carried the study of the ?bandeiras? one major step forward: they corrected the errors of the first generation ? for instance, up to then it was believed that Raposo had descended the Tocantins river, 16 degrees East of where he did it  ?; and ? more importantly ? they were responsible for giving a national dimension to an otherwise regional myth. Ever since then, and hand by hand with the strengthening of Nation and national sentiment in the country ? a process in which São Paulo could not be put aside but instead integrated to the most ?, the Paulista Bandeiras have become Brazilian. In fact, it was the Vargas regime that in the 1930s promoted the settlement of the Guaporé Valley  ? on the border with Bolivia ? in Paulista terms, and launched the much-publicised Bandeira Anhangüeira.
	Lastly, we came into acquaintance with the belated Portuguese effort to appropriate its former colony of Brazil through historical understanding. This happened in the 1980s; at the same time that Spanish historians showed a rekindled interest in their former empires, and after almost two centuries of Iberian hurt pride and dignified silence. Jaime Cortesão?s understanding of Raposo?s expedition comes from the peninsula; it affords a view inside the rooms and halls of the Lisbon court; it probes into the schemes of João IV and Vieira?s secret negotiations with Mazarin; it bespeaks of Castilian might and of the dreams of the Braganças. In its own way, it speaks of Brazil.
	With these realizations in mind, we thought that it was perhaps time to indulge in the pleasures of Rio de Janeiro. Never put off by the idea that our project somehow left the Wondrous City aside, we plunged into the beautiful bathing crowds of Ipanema and Copacabana; we explored the city centre with its landmark buildings and traditional restaurants; we went up the rocks that afford the best views of Guanabara Bay and the city below; we did our best to put Rio?s intricate geography in our heads; and we tried, without much success for the moment, to understand what role Rio played in our quest. Perhaps we should have settled for feeling instead of understanding, but we aimed for both. With many questions in mind, we said good-bye to our generous friends and took the bus to São Paulo. We knew quite well that we would be back, not once but many times. After less than a week in the Cidade Maravilhosa, a strange feeling of leaving home clouded a bit our ever-closer incursion into the sertão.
	By the time Raposo Tavares and his men left São Paulo, in the first months of 1648, the Iberian voyages of exploration in America were at a very advanced stage. The sixteenth had been the century of major discoveries and it would fall to the men of the following century to put those open paths to the use of Spanish or Portuguese governance, settlement and economic exploitation. Franciso de Orellana had disclosed the Amazon river to the Spaniards, but it was the Portuguese Pedro de Texeira who, leaving from Belem in 1637, laid the precedent for his countrymen?s progressive occupation of its banks. Even the Madeira River, the furthest and wildest reach of Raposo?s expedition, had been sailed as early as the 1550s by José Gonçalves de Fonseca. As for the routes from the Atlantic to the Paraná and Paraguay rivers across the modern southern States of Brazil, it has been said already that they were common Tupi and later Iberian routes; we may add now that Cabeza de Vaca had followed them as early as 1542.
	In fact, by Raposo?s time the silver of Potosí reached the Portuguese economy in Brazil from the south, from Buenos Aires, after having come all the way from the highlands of Alto Perú (modern-day Bolivia). Going the other way, many Portuguese merchants and artisans had emigrated to the rich city of Lima, most commonly following the main system of roads that linked Buenos Aires and the viceroyalty?s capital, but sometimes taking the shortcut that ran through Paraguay. As for the routes into northern Paraguay, they had been assimilated by the Jesuits from the Tupi Indians, as the network of their missionary efforts in the confines of the Spanish empire. As will be shown later, the only novel stretch in Raposo?s expedition was his exploration of the divortiumaquorum between the basins of the Paraná and the Amazon, north of Corumbá, of which however he did not leave any account. The breadth of the continent at this latitude was underestimated due to the shorter and better known distance between Buenos Aires and Chile. It was here that Raposo explored lands new to the Iberians. Had he not lost himself in them he might have left an account of what he saw? Or perhaps he did and it was lost, as would happen to his reputation for 200 years. We will come back to this.
	On the other hand, this time Raposo was not on the hunt for Indians, and only a part of his expedition was detached to raid the Spanish Jesuits in Paraguay, for the sake of supplies and in keeping with the long-standing war waged by the Paulistas on the monastic order. In short, Raposo did not leave São Paulo in 1648 in the pursuit of his old-time business of Indian raiding. He did not do it either in the spirit of the explorers of an essentially unknown land, as was the case of the early Spanish conquistadors and the Portuguese sailors. This would be a blatantly anachronistic contention. Raposo and his educated contemporaries were rather content with their geographic understanding of the continent where they lived, even if it was to prove perfectible. As for private enterprise, this time Raposo had a boss, and it was no other than the king of Portugal, João IV.
	This was latter vehemently asserted by a Jesuit prisoner taken by Raposo, the father Cristóbal de Arenas, whose testimony was later put down by the also Jesuit historian Bonilla. Arenas was brought to Raposo by Antonio Pereyra de Azevedo ? the expedition?s second in command ? from the missions of Paraguay, where he had gone raiding before meeting his superior in San Fernando. The priest later reported that Raposo carried seven small cannons and sealed letters from João IV, by which he was entrusted with a secret mission related to the ?opening of a Portuguese pass to Peru? (?abrir um camninho português para o Perú?). About Raposo?s role in the Portuguese royal plans of independence and greatness, nothing more can be said. Jaime Cortesão used it as an intelligent hypothesis, with a great deal of indirect evidence to back it up.  We used it here as yet another tool to travel Brazil after Raposo?s steps.
	Our bus reached the outskirts of São Paulo in the late hours of the afternoon, thus giving us time and light to see one of the largest cities in the world pass in front of our windows. It was all mainly white, but crowned by dots of colour in the form of kites ? pipos, as they are called in Portuguese. Hundreds of pipos, attesting to the windy season, surely, but also to kids striving for playing space in the maze of the built-in Planalto. It took us a good long hour to make it near the centre of the city where the rodoviaria takes in hundreds and hundreds of buses daily, full of immigrants and travellers. What we had seen from the plane a week before could be now seen from the ant-like perspective of us men, condemned to dreaming of our flight in the form of kites or pay for a plane hop.
	At last we were in Raposo? s old town, with the incidental differences that houses were not any longer one-storied, but skyscrapers; the urban perimeter was not that of a village separated from its communal manors, but the amorphous line of an ever-growing monster of concrete and asphalt; the surrounding Planalto was not visible anymore as the town?s agricultural hinterland, but relegated beyond endless stretches of whitish urbanism; dwellers did not plant beans and maize in the back of their houses, but lived on top of each other and walked on Sundays with their kids to find some open air where to lift a kite. Raposo?s town had outgrown all the old vice royal capitals of South America; quite a twist of fortune for a place where ?opening a pass to Peru? had once been the main bet for progress.
	São Paulo was to provide us with a great deal of information about Raposo?s expedition and about Brazil, present and past. The city?s daytime whiteness gives way nowadays to nighttime twilight, as an acute energetic crisis has turned much of the public lights off. Darkness is coupled with the prospects of acute economic recession and grim estimates for mid-term growth. Pessimism hovers over the Avenida Paulista in the form of its unlit massive buildings, which nonetheless carry the city?s pride through the day. The faces of homebound pedestrians, in search of the metro or a bus stop, become discernable only in the last second when they cross our stride. They look down, attentive to any stumbling bumps and crevices in the pavements. In spite of the dark that covers it at night and hunts it at work, the city buzzes and hums incessantly, and it thinks.
	So we could attest to our utmost benefit in the USP, the gigantic Universidade de São Paulo. There we headed after we had learned to find our way in the city?s public transport system and after we had indulged our bedazzlement in front of the sheer magnitude of city centre buildings, metro stations, monumental squares and rivers of people walking in all directions. Two bus routes enter the university campus, and one better know well where to get off.
	We asked our way to the History Department, a heavy grey building cut in the fashion of 1960s architecture, and containing a couple of libraries and some offices. Neither of these was easy to use, even if they are open to anyone, but we managed to get some bibliographic references and a phone number that was to prove most helpful. Professor João Manuel Montero would meet us next day, on campus.
	Next day too we were scheduled to try our luck at the Paulista Museum and Library, the ultimate use to which the superb Ipiranga Palace was put. Our next day would be busy and filled with hurried crisscrossings of the mega city. And since our shots were spent at the USP for the time being, and in São Paulo the days are short, we decided to head back to the hotel via the Latin American Memorial and Congress. This was our committed tribute to the greatest abortive attempt at continental unity after Bolívar?s, back in the 1820s. The ensemble of buildings was much in keeping with the materials and spirit we had seen in the USP. Great grey and white walls, esplanades not to be walked through but to be filled with people, ample ramparts and the highest ceilings. On the other and, the outcry ? painted on the walls and seen as a craving in the faces of the best students ? for a useful body of Latin American thought. Dreams too were present in those airy buildings, either as an excess of colour in the University?s graffiti or as a gallery of continental art in Niemeyer?s Latin American Memorial.
	The USP goes hand in hand with other Latin American universities like the UNAM in Mexico or the Nacional in Colombia.  Every country has at least one of them, apart from the smaller, private ones and the old colonial colleges. They are all massive; State funded and up to the 1980s they were the undisputed centres of academic prestige. They were also very active politically well into the 1990s, when crisis struck. What exactly this crisis is about is a matter of open discussion, but whatever the combination of factors, it cannot escape being also a crisis of thought, the very thing they are meant to produce. It so happens that in these days commodities like development theories, macroeconomic thought and the philosophical foundations of social policy are imported by governments from abroad. The Latin American universities have been made redundant at subjects like that, and have been left to cater for basic technologies like bridge building and general surgery, together with an aloof and intractable-for-most approach to the humanities.
	This circle of redundancy and Platonism is closed when, according to those imported recipes for State efficiency, over-simplified social policy and punctual foreign debt payment, governments reduce the universities? budgets and shut their voices ever more. Back in the 1960s and 70s, university professors in places like the USP could plead political persecution and the poor thinking of empowered dictators. In the 1990s and nowadays, it is hard for it and its Latin American counterparts to escape from the tacit accusation that they never produced a body of thought that could be used by their societies for the sake of development, equality and self-determination. As for importing other countries? ready-made recipes, coroneis first and the yuppie sons of politicians and industrialists later, have proved much more efficient and less remorseless than professors. Coroneis and yuppies, however, do not afford enough of an alibi for the lack of a body of thought useful for Latin American societies as a whole, even if the first were deft at killing and the second at buying off their dissidents. The massive Latin American universities are in debt to their societies, as much as their societies are in debt to all the silenced, exiled and killed professors who saw their work interrupted. Proof enough of this is the ironic fact that they are being put aside and trimmed down by textbook versions of Friedmannian political economy produced in places as utterly unexpected as the University of Chicago at the time of Kennedy?s Alliance for Progress.
	This is a tricky contention, however. The degree to which thinkers are to be held accountable for historical developments is proportional to the minute degree to which history is the product of thought.  But for one thing thinkers must indisputably be held accountable: that is, for failing to think. Surely, Latin American universities are just as affected by the impending continental crisis as all other entities of society are. Surely, the Latin American States and their private sectors have failed to capitalize on local thought and to stimulate. The continent is the land of wasted thought, and that is not the sole fault of the universities. But they must produce more and better. They are not innocent; they know too much for that. It is easy to be a Latin American catastrophist and to think that nothing goes well, but very few Latin Americans believe now that globalisation will be made profitable for the continent in the longer run, that governments will strike good deals with their debtors, that progress will not occur at the cost of repression, that social justice is in the making. The universities can do more, they must do more.
	On the other hand, Latin American universities do produce knowledge of the highest quality, even when it is doomed to go unheeded. Professor João Manuel Montero showed us that in the clearest possible way. His command of Brazilian history is only comparable to his generosity in passing it on to those who ask him questions. To him we owe some of the best insights we used in our trip across Brazil, and some of the best clues about Raposo?s expedition. Outside the university, our other main source of understanding in São Paulo was the library of the Paulista Museum, held in a cut of past time like a bubble in the air. It was most useful for us in following some threads we had picked up in Rio and others given to us by professor Montero. Marlene, the librarian, almost overwhelmed us with her help and the absolute respect in which she holds her job. After all, she is in direct charge of the beautiful and passionately pro-Paulista library of the late Alfonse Taunay, the already cited Paulista historian of the 1940s. Perhaps part of his work in promoting São Paulo?s grand idea of itself was to commission the magnificent statue of Antonio Raposo Tavares that ? together with that of Fernando Pais, the discoverer of emeralds ? welcomes all visitors to the lofty palace of Ipiranga.
	Caught as we were between the hectic pace of São Paulo?s thoroughfares and rivers of people, and our avid quests in books and interviews, we somehow managed to take some time out to see other faces of the city. The Ibirapuera Park ? cut as a green void in the city?s blanket of white and grey ? gave us a much-needed respite. Herons fly over its ponds and cut their figure against the silhouette of Niemeyer?s State Assembly building. They hunt small