Opinion – Josimar Melo: Antônio Maria’s greedy eyes on Via Dutra

For several reasons, the collection of chronicles by Antonio Maria, a native of Pernambuco who won Rio de Janeiro until he died prematurely (but not without having lived intensely) in 1964, enchanted me. They are in the book “Vento Vadio” (Editor However), beautifully paraded by the organizer Guilherme Tauil.

For those who don’t know him, it’s worth starting at the beginning, reading Tauil’s serenely surgical biography. It shows not only the journalist but also the composer of popular music masterpieces, the sports broadcaster, the TV director (a vehicle that was barely born), the inveterate bohemian, the insecure lover.

My emotions when reading it were many. Even because my father, a migrant from Pernambuco like Maria, a talented and acclaimed journalist like him, and equally dead prematurely (and even younger, a year later), had been his colleague in the same Rio de Janeiro, sharing the same warm air, the same cloudy nightclubs, same copious friends, some same thundering bosses, and who knows what else.

Reading his reminiscences of Pernambuco, including the rural life where he spent his vacations, brings me an unjustified nostalgia, since I was born there, with paternal grandparents living in the wild countryside, but in the capital between the rivers or on the farm by the dam I never lived.

Reading his stories from Rio de Janeiro, the land where my parents met, also transported me to a childhood where I lived there, still illiterate and naively happy before moving permanently to São Paulo.

But my memories were also captured by another geography, described in the chronicle “Guia Prático e Sentimental da Rio-São Paulo”. Although written in 1953, before I was born, it describes a journey along the Via Dutra that years later I would take driven by my father, with the whole family on board.

In the opposite direction, it was from São Paulo that we were traveling. Late? Why not take a plane? It wasn’t just the price, then higher than today.

There was the pleasure of driving. To see time and the landscape run by the window. It was not a practical matter of time. Many (Maria included) prided themselves on making the journey in much less than the regular six hours.

But, in the chronicle, he does not recommend the feat, “because he would miss the best part of the tour: the stops”.

Enormous, gluttonous, he then proceeds to describe the delights of the way. The dinner in Resende, with his “delicious steak, made in butter, with the sauce of his own blood”, which he would have presented to Rubem Braga, Millôr Fernandes, Dorival Caymmi.

In Taubaté, where people talk to their “oloroso ‘R'”, “the most delicious sausages in the world, freshly fried”. In São José dos Campos, a rice chicken “no different” from those at home; and, in Jacareí, its famous cookies are offered on the side of the road.

I’ve never looked at Dutra with those greedy eyes: when I was a kid, we’d be armed with breaded steak sandwiches prepared by my mother.

Older, he crossed the road more to walk it than to enjoy it.

Only once did he want to visit a restaurant (also a hotel, in the style of French relais) located close to the border between the two states. It was called O Paturi, it was famous for its duck with orange (paturi is a variety of this bird), and it still offered a comforting landing to travelers.

The hotel still exists, in the midst of a huge green area, with a lake and swimming pool; the restaurant closed in the pandemic. I even stayed there, like someone traveling along the roads of Bourgogne. It was cold, suitable for the French menu, and to make us yearn for the carioca heat that in a few hours, we always thought, would welcome us.