Opinion – Josimar Melo: Downhill and, worse, up too

I’m the type who travels by plane, but loves a walk. Where I get, I’ve barely unpacked my suitcase and I’m already on the street. I don’t have the expertise to stake out land with the indelible seal of a dog, and I don’t want to.

I just like to pretend I’m not a stranger, take a look around and, the next day, say I’m going there for a coffee at “my” bar on the corner, or leafing through books in “my” neighborhood bookstore, or even (I swear I’ve done in ages) get a haircut at the barber shop down the block.

I always do this, with just one caveat: that corner that I pretend to be my old childhood surroundings needs to be on level ground. Because, nowadays, for me, slopes are landscape, they were born to be admired, never climbed (on foot).

I do the same in São Paulo as in every flat city in the world. In my day to day I walk a lot. Not for sport, for locomotion. I have very limited patience to walk nowhere.

Going to the park for a walk or running in circles depresses me as a drunken turkey must be depressed, which turns in vain before slaughter (when drunk, I prefer this side of the table).

Going on a treadmill, walking indefinitely without leaving the place, despairs me as the hamster must despair that, in that sadistic cylinder, runs as if fighting for his life, without ever getting anywhere.

It was explained to me that so much “immobile displacement” leads to a wonderful pot of gold—that endorphin that during the rush would produce intense waves of pleasure. I’ve tried to believe that, I’ve run like crazy, but my metabolism always refuses to snag it.

I run, I run, and no pleasures, on the contrary: with each step, I feel spurts of sweat spurt through my pores, drenching bursts of neurons that, angry and in despair, flee by the millions of the body (Peru? Hamster?) that acts so without purpose.

Well then. All this to explain that, in other people’s cities or mine, I prefer to move in the plane and in the rhythm that evolution has imprinted on our bodies: that of minimal effort. On hunting day, run like a famished after the bison; in the others, save the accumulated energies.

My hunting day is the Saturday market. Which is on the same geographic quota (same height) as where I live. But I made a pleasant exception last Saturday, the 8th, in the dangerously sloping Vila Madalena.

It is a neighborhood of São Paulo full of pros and cons – among them, its steep slopes. A car overcomes them effortlessly, but my pleasure in walking disappears in it, which includes the gentle observation of the surroundings.

I went to a group exhibition at Galeria Millan, an irresistible appeal. The gallery owner is a childhood acquaintance, one of the artists is my daughter’s dear grandmother, Helena Carvalhosa, the curator, a youth companion, the guru Rodrigo Naves, and among the works, artists for whom I have great admiration, such as Paulo Pasta and Laura Vinci.

Well, leaving there, I fell down the slopes (going back up was something else). In search of energy, I headed to Martim Fierro, missing his barbecue (failure: there was a 50-minute wait).

Changing continents, I then landed on the Vietnamese Miss Saigon, more for its wonderful story (a couple of refugees rescued on the high seas by a Petrobras ship) than for its mild flavor (but I had fun invading the table of a couple of friends that I saw there).

And I even stopped at the door of the irresistible Dona Zelda cheese bread, to eat with the coffee from Minas Gerais there.

Bravely conquered the frightening hills, I was still recovering the calories that drained along the way; and, being a tour with destinations, there was no apparent leakage of neurons. The tour even stayed in profit.