The Park

I have been hounding this park, I have been hounded by this park. The stillness, the veiled light underneath the trees. The air there is pale green, with stripes, I’m certain. I know it from a dream, I have dreamt of it many times before. I just don’t remember how old the dream is…

Back in October, on my first visit to Brazil, we drove by the park on Alameda Jaú and there was the instant flash, the certainty of déjà-vu. “I’ve been here before, I know this place intimately”. It made sense, it was so near the old apartment where we used to live. I could see myself inside it, being led into its green labyrinth, someone had held my hand and led me inside it. Glossy, dark dark green foliage. I had never seen such dark, petroleum-green leaves anywhere else in my life.

Parque Trianon, somebody told me. Or perhaps I just read a sign the day I finally walked by it. I had never known its name. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t have a name, it need not have a name, its existence was not dependent upon a name. It had always been inside me, nameless, and yet totally real. The park just was. I had forgotten that the park still lived inside me.

A long long time ago, after I’d left it, after I’d stopped going there, it had still pulsated with irregular beats, it had surged forth in my mind’s eye at the strangest moments. But then it had lodged itself deep down inside, just waiting, like a small animal in a cave, for the day when it would be retrieved.

Black and white mosaic paths. I had been delaying the encounter with the park, its dark greenness, the thickness of its canopy, the plants that grew at ground level, below all the trees growing very close together. And then I finally went in, almost apprehensive (will my dream vanish, or will the actual park disintegrate? Only one park can survive, I thought). I knew that I’d been there as a very small child; I must have been two, three, four years old.

I don’t know why I waited so long before visiting it again, even though I’d been living only a few blocks away from it, down by Joaquim Eugenio de Lima. It was only in May, three months after my arrival, that I ventured inside it. Vines wrapping themselves amorously around thick trunks, brown-grey trunks like elephant legs. Stalks with thousands of leaves twisting around the tree trunks, colonizing them. Parasites. Furry green tree trunks. Tall palm trees with their glossy green palm leaves and a jet of brown octopus legs underneath, furry octopus tentacles.

I had been taken down its lanes and its winding paths. In a pram, or holding a giant’s hand. I muttered inside me “I have known this park, I have known this park. I have known this park.” As though if I repeated this mantra over and over again, I could know it again, now.

My park, my dear dear park. You’re mine again.