MY PARENTAL UNIT TALKED OCCASIONALLY ABOUT visiting Mom's brother Tadeusz in Sao Paulo, but postponed it until they lost interest. Dad simply exchanged letters with fellow refugees there and in other countries.
In 1980 they suggested I go to Sao Paulo to visit Tadeusz's widow Ania, and write travel articles while we still had a family connection and people to provide lodgings and local information. Both of Tadeusz's children would be there -- Dorota in Brasilia on a three-year rotation as a Foreign Office Consul, and Artur managing a project in Sao Paulo for the Swedish engineering multi-national Sandvik.
The Globe and Mail's Travel Editor, Joe Cohen, was about to retire when I asked if he'd like articles from Brazil. He suggested I approach the op-ed page editor instead. She was very interested in Brazil's high inflation, alternative fuels for cars, gas rationing, how Brasilia the Capital was doing at age 20, all with photos. A new editor of the alumni quarterly at St. Michael's College, my alma mater in the University of Toronto, named a couple of grads in Rio and said he'd welcome story ideas about them.
So I had good reasons to go, and booked flights for a month beginning in mid-October.
Mom and Dad probably didn't want to see Ania again. In Warsaw in the 1920s and '30s they'd belonged to a large social circle in which Tadeusz and his first wife, Wanda, were the most elegant, happy "beautiful couple" and everyone's favourite friends. Married in September of 1939, they had two daughters while working in the underground Home Army against both Germans and Russians. In 1943, because he knew too much to risk being arrested and tortured, Tadeusz was smuggled out by the Allies and worked for them in London.
After 1945, disturbing gossip reached us and family in Warsaw: Ania had followed Tadeusz to London. Someone had told him Wanda, Helena and Marta were dead. He was unable to return to a Poland ruled by communists because they have perpetual memories about opponents. He married Ania and they settled in Brazil.
Somehow and I don't know when, we all learned that Wanda, Helena and Marta were alive in Warsaw. No one knew if Ania had known that before she went to London.
In 1947 Wanda was imprisoned by Poland's communist government for her underground opposition to them 1939-45. She was told often that if Tadeusz returned to Poland she would be set free to rejoin her daughters. She always responded she "could scarcely remember who he was". In 1955 she was released with severe tuberculosis and lived in Warsaw.
Dad's correspondents in Brazil wrote that although Tadeusz didn't keep in touch he was a civil host when they knocked on his door. They sensed he was very unhappy, perhaps even ashamed of how his life had turned out.
My grandmother and Mom wrote to him for years without receiving a reply. While Granny was in Toronto during 1962 because of my wedding and he brought Dorota and Artur to visit us, no one asked questions. We were grateful to see him and meet them.
In Poland in 1959 I'd learned that Tadeusz supported Wanda and their girls financially from the late 1940s while he rose to become Brazilian vice-president for global Squibb Corporation. He paid for university educations for the Warsaw daughters, and for his Brazilian children to earn degrees in Poland. All four lived for at least a year in the other country, bonding happily for life. In the 1970s, his health failing, he moved back to Warsaw. He and Wanda didn't live together but saw each other almost every day until her death. He died a year later.
While my parents had understandable attitudes towards Aunt Ania, I felt only mild curiosity. She was very hospitable during my stay, but she couldn't know if gossip had reached me, nor did she ask, so we couldn't relax together. I was polite but couldn't warm up to her.
Their rambling bungalow on a large lot was near the original downtown of vast Sao Paulo, its head offices, major stores and restaurants, and consulates. They'd bought it new in 1951 after working only five years in Latin America's largest city. In 1980 a young bonne a tout faire named Filomena lived with Ania, then about 70 and still a very good-looking woman.
She had sold products of all kinds freelance, and took my proposal for a working visit as a request by one professional to another. First of all, she said I must beware of thieves and pickpockets every minute of my stay. Then she told me she'd found sources for all the research I needed, picked up the telephone and we arranged interviews.
She wouldn't let me step alone beyond her (locked) front gate, so I couldn't go out without "Fila", although the girl already had endless chores and also accompanied Ania wherever she went. I like to explore new locations by walking, map in hand, around a new address in a growing spiral, like a cat, to get my bearings. Ania wouldn't even let me walk up and down her street alone.
I went with Fila to a supermarket and listed prices I would re-check on my last day, to prove the inflation rate. I made an appointment with the St. Michael's grad who had been ordained: An Oblate missionary in a favela for 20 years, Father John Drexel, OMI, showed me the workshop where he trained boys to use tools for all kinds of repairs, and we had tea in a couple of "houses".
I called two of Dad's friends and accepted dinner invitations. In a taxi Ania trusted I went one afternoon, at her insistence, to visit venomous snakes at Butantan Institute, where anti-venoms were produced. A friend of Dad's picked me up there.
Ania had arranged for me to go to Rio, to friends of hers for 10 days, and then fly to Brasilia to visit Dorota. She pre-paid my tickets. My month filled up much faster than I could have managed.
I phoned the Canadian Consulate for an appointment to get names of Canadian ex-pats. No appointment was needed, but I told Ania I had one on a day when I knew she was booked for an eye test and would need Fila. With a couple of bus tickets and a map, I happily set out alone.
(A neighbour would occupy the house while we were all out; Ania thought of everything.)
My first words to the young Consul were "My wallet was stolen on the way here. Could you lend me a bus ticket to go home?" My large purse, from which the wallet was lifted, still contained pencils, notepad, camera and films. (The very old wallet contained only a return bus ticket and CD$10.) After getting contact information for other Canadians in town I interviewed the Consul about tourists being robbed during vacations. He had a hefty budget to help us.
I never admitted the theft to Ania but I think she sensed it.
In Rio her friends were a Canadian managing the South American company of Ice Capades, and his Polish-born wife. They met as skaters in World and Olympic competitions and now she was the company's choreographer and costume designer. Their spacious apartment filled the third floor of a four-storey building a block from Ipanema Beach.
Its two elevators with separate controls served different worlds. Both front doors opened on a marble-and-mirrors ground floor lobby, then revealed elegant foyers for family and guestson the other three floors. Their rear doors opened to much larger spaces for servants, rain gear, deliveries, garbage bins. All areas were spotless.
My hosts' live-in housekeeper worked six days a week. Three different cooks took turns shopping and coming in to prepare meals. Just then, the wife's parents were visiting from Warsaw for six months, which they did every year. Magda's three-year-old daughter was looked after by her grandmother while she carried a two-month-old son everywhere and nursed him.
She sent me in a trusted taxi to meet a Canadian woman who 15 years earlierhad founded a home for street children, a Lar Infantil. She and her husband, a banker, had three children in school.She raised money from all directions. She bought a six-bedroom bungalow in a modest but respectable area, paid a young couple to live in, found regular donors of food, made sure the girls and boys went to school, to a dentist. She also hounded adoption agencies to keep her youngsters moving on. In awe of what she had achieved, I taped a 45-minute interview.
Magda arranged for a bachelor friend to fill up his Volkswagen's tank with enough rationed "gasohol" to drive us (at the most fuel-efficient speed) to Petropolis, a mountain resort built by Brazil's 19th Century emperor for his court. When Carlo delivered us home he pointed out he still had some fuel.
I played tourist with Magda's father and her three-year-old. We went to Rio's botanical garden, to Sugar Loaf by cable car, up another hill to Corcovado. We especially enjoyed crossing Guanabara Bay to seek the convent in Niteroi where my parents and I were refugees. We found it, no nun who remembered 1940 refugees but there was one who had heard about us. We rode a streetcar going to Niteroi and returned on a huge flat ferry with almost 1,000 seats. Dad had used the streetcars to and fro while working in Rio. The ferries came later.
I also toured crowded small shops in a couple of narrow streets where members of samba schools buy everything they need for Carnaval costumes. Mom had shopped there for bits of fabric, single sewing needles and tiny packets of thread, inches of lace, single buttons, tiny beads, etc. She made dolls from scratch wearing Polish ethnic dress, ball gowns, Scottish tartans and kilts, then sold them to wealthy Brazilians who funded refugee shelters such as the one in Niteroi.
With Dorota I spent three days in Brasilia.
Back in Sao Paulo, while I packed to fly home, Ania sat nearby musing about her life there. She said she had had to build their lives because Tadeusz was "a lazy dreamer", a nice man but not practical. She bought their big house and staffed it. She assembled their network of friends all over Brazil. She financed the children's education....
I came away wondering if Uncle Tadeusz spent his earnings only on Wanda and the girls in Poland. But I didn't ask, so we'll never know.
CHAPTER 57 of GLIMPSES -- 30