GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

58. And after Brazil

MY PARENTS WANTED TO KNOW EVERY DETAIL of my visit. Newsletter deadlines loomed, assignments from The Communications Group, Wanda 1 and Monty were scheduled, yet I had to produce Brazil articles while they were timely. Dad remarked that I wasn't stuttering any more (two years after leaving Charles). I didn't have time!!! 

The Globe's op-ed editor bought three articles she headed "A fast turn into the era of alcohol fuel", "Galloping inflation: ground beef and shrugs", and "Brasilia: a soaring, sterile bird".

I began the last

"Our guide said 'Brasilia was designed by town planner Lucio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer'.

"'Do they live here?' asked a German woman.

"'No.'

"'I can see why! The scale of the place is inhuman.'

"The guide shrugged. 'That's why it has no soul. But it is interesting, don't you think?'

"Poor, interesting Brasilia, the fabulous capital city shaped like a bird. Government buildings flank its upper body and fill its head. A nation's military establishment occupies the tip of its tail. Residential buildings form vast, outstretched wings. And so it lies, on the brick-red clay of Brazil's arid Planalto Central, suffering from chronic compartmentalization caused by a massive overdose of Reason."

I crammed a lot into the item besides snide remarks. It ended

"On Sunday, every servant in town having the day off, families drive from one of the half-dozen restaurants to their club, to the hippie market, to another restaurant, seeing all the same people they saw at the previous place.

"The last thing you can enjoy in Brasilia is a walk. There's barely a hint of contour in the hundreds of acres of grassy median which make up most of the bird's body, perhaps a dozen trees, not a single bench, and views of world-famous buildings stay the same except that eventually they're closer if you walk long enough, which means almost forever.

"At the University of Toronto, I studied jaywalking on Queen's Park Crescent, but in Brasilia I met a street I couldn't cross -– six lanes in one direction with no speed limit.

"It's the most exasperating place I've ever been!

"Yet when I told a Brazilian who has lived there six years that it can't possibly work, he said, 'But it does'. And he laughed."

In his letter to the editor a man in Burlington, Ontario, protested that "Like any of the world's great capital cities...it will take time for Brasilia to develop a soul, a character and lifestyle unique to itself." In 2016 I sense from online sites that residents with money still escape for weekends. 

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One of my photos appeared with each Brazilian article, but the editor phoned to say all my negatives had been lost. Did I mind? Would I accept $10 by way of apology? I don't remember my reply, but still wish I had even one print from Brazil in an album.

No publication wanted an article about Magda breast-feeding in public when the young bachelor escorted us around Petropolis.

Nineteen-80 was 25 years after seven U.S. mothers founded La Leche League in Chicago, 10 after Princess Grace of Monaco addressed a conference of members about breast-feeding her children. The League is now over 60, but health care, water bottlers, makers of formula, can't make money from breast-feeding so North Americans are programmed to oppose it.

The editor of St. Michael's College's alumni quarterly, who'd given me the lead to my fellow-alumnus Father John Drexel, didn't want an article about a priest working in a favela. He wanted only items about alumni who donated generously. He moved to a magazine that paid better, but his successor wasn't interested in Father John, either.