Scene 5
VII - mãe preta
/ When I lived there in Paulista, I saw all the demolition of various mansions so that today there are these wonderful buildings. So I took in the whole trajectory of the streetcar going up, the parallelepiped on this side below, those super elegant women we were at the time, dresses below the knee, the men in their hats, suits and briefcases, my father used a briefcase to carry his lunch. He looked like an industrialist, that pinstriped suit, the panama hat.
And the umbrella, which we didn't deny because São Paulo was the São Paulo of the drizzle and every day it drizzled, it was terribly foggy. So I picked up this part here too, where the children played in the street, the mammas would put chairs on the sidewalks, and then the children would play catch, bogie, birdie, ball.
And the milkman, and the baker, and the newsagent, they would put... Bread on the walls of those who didn't have a house, and sometimes they would pass by and drink the milk. And all this we saw as the neighborhood grew, and we grew with the neighborhood, changing some things, the streets that were no longer parallelepiped, even in Tobias' songs, the Samba School, the stars that we saw before, we couldn't see them anymore because it was just skyscrapers growing up.