The daughter of the flood
I'm the daughter of the 1941 flood, the biggest ever to hit Porto Alegre. During the months of April and May of that year, the Guaíba rose 3.76 m above its normal level and left a quarter of the population homeless, without light or food. The 22 days that this tragedy lasted were difficult times. But the worst was to come after the waters receded, when a large part of the population fell ill with leptospirosis. Although it was a great tragedy and my father lived soaking wet, running from place to place to take care of his relatives, there were moments of sweetness. Nine months later I was born.
My parents lived in Pelotas Street, in a second floor apartment. At the height of the flood, my sister would spend hours looking out of the living room window at the canoes floating down the street, waiting for the waters to recede and for her to return to school. As soon as it was possible to leave the house, my father went in search of food. At the market, he bought everything possible, no matter what. In addition to the shortage, everything became very expensive. Many traders took the opportunity to charge a fortune for the few products they had on their shelves. To prevent the people from being exploited, the government had to regulate food prices. Even so, at the end of the flood, 117 shopkeepers were imprisoned in the House of Detention for not respecting the tariff.
In the years following the flood, we moved to the top of Rua da Ponte, which is now called Riachuelo. Our apartment was near Rocco's patisserie and the Seventh Army Barracks, where my father did his military service. At that time, my mother had several friends with whom she would meet every week to chat and drink tea while they did their handiwork. On the day of these meetings, we would take the streetcar right after lunch. Drowsy from the rocking of the streetcar, which threw me from side to side, I would lean against my mother's warm body and fall asleep along the way. I still remember the soft scent of lavender from her clothes.
While my mother and her friends crocheted and embroidered, my sister and I struggled against the drowsiness deciding which sweets we would buy later. On those days when we strolled through the city center to visit my mother's friends, we would take the opportunity to go to the haberdashery to look for ribbons, threads and laces to put on our clothes and, on the way back, we would stop by the Neugebauer or Schramm pastry shop, where we would buy a large tray of sweets that we would take home to eat with my father. At this time, all our clothes were made by my mother on her old Singer treadle sewing machine, even our underwear. For a few years we wore several garments that were made from two rolls of fabric recovered from the flood and then washed repeatedly until all the stains from the muddy water came out. Only the party clothes were bought ready-made at the Casa Krahe store, located right in the center of Rua da Praia.
Sometimes, when the housework slowed down or my mother got bored with sewing, she would take us for a longer streetcar ride. On these days we would go to Prado Velho. On lucky days, we might even see a horse training. I, who had always been crazy about horses and spent my afternoons glued to the radio listening to the races, was thrilled on these occasions. I remember that the most impressive moment of a horse race, when it seemed as if the broadcaster almost lost his mind with emotion, was when the horses passed the bend in the water's eye. Years later, the racetracks were removed from that area and it was transformed into what is now the Parcão. Where the Curva dos Olhos D'Água used to be, there is now an artificial lake. I miss those racing days! That was a vibrant place, full of energy. Today it's an extensive park brutally cut in half by an avenue, through which thousands of cars pass every day.
At weekends, when my father joined us, we would go to Campo da Várzea, which stretched along Caminho do Meio, where Parque da Redenção and Av. Osvaldo Aranha are today. On those days, my mother was all smiles thanks to my father's attention. We children were invaded by a sense of bewilderment, the kind that takes hold of us during the vacation months, when we explore distant lands. But my father, in those days, seemed to be fighting an attack of melancholy, the so-called banzo that seized slaves far from their native Africa. The intense pace of his life in Porto Alegre and his excessive responsibilities at work meant that he isolated himself from us and lived in a bad mood. This only changed during the vacations, when we went to Erechim to visit relatives, or in the rare moments we spent in Campo da Várzea.
The streetcar ride to Várzea was long and full of excitement. My sister and I would admire the scenery and read the announcements. Our favorite claim was invariably declaimed aloud, to the delight of the other passengers: "Look, illustrious passenger, what a handsome guy you have next to you. And yet, believe me, he almost died of bronchitis. The creosoted rhum saved him". When we finally arrived at our destination, we saw in front of us a large expanse of land covered in scrubland where the cattle, which had been brought by the cattle drovers from the farms in the interior of the state, were left to rest and gain weight in the pasture, before heading off to slaughter. Large herds of cattle would thus roam free for several days along the streetcar tracks, watched over by the zealous eyes of the drovers who were camped there. On the middle track, right next to it, the ox carts were parked.
Wow, remembering all these stories made me emotional. Sometimes I even forget that I've lived through so many changes, so many good and unpretentious moments. Of all of them, these were the best. One of these days I'll tell you about our vacations in Erechim. But now, darling, let me sleep for a while.
Note: the image illustrating this story was generated by Artificial Intelligence. Despite the resources of this technique, it was not possible to obtain an image of a streetcar that looked like one from that era.