The other Park

The journey of recollection is beset by traps. Armadilhas. Although I was so happy to have found my park, I had nagging doubts about whether it really was “the one”. What if I were just fooling myself, willing the park to be the iconic one of my shadowy memories? That day when I got reacquainted with it, I walked along its paths and found it familiar and alien at the same time. I saw people (mostly young, possibly unemployed men) sitting on benches, dog-walkers, an abnormally low number of joggers, and a man practicing yoga in a corner by a huge figueira tree. I convinced myself that this was the park. But I had no scientific evidence.

Strangely, I’ve never revisited the park. My most recurring contact with it is when my friends and I drive down one of its bordering streets, Peixoto Gomide, at night when we’re traversing Jardins. At this time the park is taken over by young boys, "garotos de programa" waiting for their clients, lonesome dark shapes waiting for a car to stop. And watching the dodginess of the place at night, I have actually laughed out loud at my absurdly nostalgic bent of mind.

I do still walk past Parque Trianon when I’m running errands on Avenida Paulista. In front of the entrance, there is a massive white statue of a bearded man (I used to think it was Dom Pedro), all oversized, muscular legs and arms, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Everytime I walk in front of it I notice the unreal, exaggerated size of the man’s limbs, its huge, thick stone legs practically bursting out of its stone trousers. I now know it isn’t the monarch at all, but a representation of a brave bandeirante, of a kind of 16th century Indiana Jones that seems to have just emerged from the virgin forest behind him. And indeed, the park is all Mata Atlântica, the exotic and over-the-top vegetation that skirts most of Brazil’s coast and that is supposed to hold more biodiversity than the Amazonian jungle itself.

A stone’s throw away from the gigantic stone man, I always encounter another fixture: a small, weathered beggar sitting on the steps leading to the street, a one-armed figure loitering eternally on the corner of the street. His short stump, his beak nose, his lined face, everything imbues him with a kind of tragic Greek aura in my mind. In the hustle-and-bustle of Avenida Paulista, his immobility makes him hyper-real, it makes him look like a veritable apparition.

The less people notice the one-armed man, the more he stands out for me, like all the other miserable people who sit all year round in that relentless serpent of an avenue. I imagine that after a while, all beggars become statues to passersby. They are part of the landscape. In my most glum state of mind, I can also imagine that perhaps no one would notice if a bunch of dirty pigeons sat on their heads and shoulders.

And if I allow myself to linger in the “Greek tragedy” feeling that often assaulted me, during my first months in São Paulo, whenever I walked down Avenida Paulista, the image that rises in my mind is so grotesque I hardly dare to share it: I see the pigeons turning into rapacious vultures, beaking the beggars to death as if they were the city’s offering to the gods. And people continue to walk by, hurriedly.