Back home to where I have never been

by Daniel Caetano (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Brazil

This time, I was not travelling to go anywhere new. After years of living in Australia as an immigrant, I missed Brazil. The excitement of this trip was beautifully nostalgic and somewhat melancholic – that is best described by the Portuguese word ‘saudade’ – now included in the Oxford English dictionary for being notoriously difficult to translate into English. To appease this incompleteness, probably felt by all immigrants, I was longing to reconnect with smells, customs, traditions, food, language, sounds and - most importantly- people that were already familiar and well-known to me. The chosen spot by the first friend I was going to (re)visit was St. Benedict’s square – a historical site in Sao Paulo, near the Municipal Market where there is a catholic monastery, a school, a college and a church. People were gathering towards the church and the bells announced that a mass was about to begin. A familiar smile emerged from the crowd and as arms wide open welcomed me into a friendly hug, I immediately forgot the hundreds of other spots I thought would be more suitable for a Sunday morning catch up with an old friend. We walked around chatting for a while and my friend asked if I had been there before. I had, but it didn’t matter. I was happy to be there. He insisted and asked me if I had been there on a Sunday. I had not. He declared grinning that I was in for a treat. ‘It’s like time travelling’ he said. Bernardo was a photographer and very interested in art and history. He was never conventional in high school with his tattoos and body-piercings that were too many and too weird to describe. He had a personality to match them and an outstanding intelligence– that too was still the same. I was confused and intrigued as he led me to the church. I knew he was not religious. The noise and bustle from the street seemed to gradually fade behind us as I started to hear an organ. Inside the basilica the organ was impressive – the seven thousand pipes on the flanks of the second floor high above us blew intense, polyphonic and majestic sounds that reminded me of the ‘Phantom of the Opera’. A group of monks with their backs turned to the crowd chanted and I did not recognize the language. I took a moment to take it all in. I felt confronted by feeling so unfamiliar in my own country to the point I did not understand what was happening. But there was something soothing about the way the monks chanted. My eyes and ears were delighted as when you go to a foreign country for the first time. After we left the mass, we had brunch at the monastery with bread and jam made by the monks. I devoured the delicious bread while Bernardo answered my questions – We had just witnessed the ancient practice of Gregorian chanting and the mass was fully in Latin, like before the Reformation – a political movement of the XVI century that challenged the hegemony of the catholic church, gave rise to the Protestant movement and - among other things - made the rituals and the bible more accessible to ample understanding, interpretation -and criticism- by translating them from Latin into other languages. It felt strange to see something so traditional and yet completely unknown to me in my own country. That visit to European history in the middle of the largest city in South America stuck with me. Unexpected is not what you want to find when you go back home. But it renewed my perspective and was a preface to what I was going to learn from the rest of that trip back home. As it turns out, a lot had changed and was completely new to me. There was familiarity indeed that felt like meeting old friends. But sadly -or not-, the Brazil I left behind - the one in my memories – no longer exists. Luckily, I will keep the ‘saudade’ and look forward to the excitement of re-discovering my own home country each time I return.