Carta ao Tom — A Letter to Antonio Carlos Jobim

Before the World Cup, my search for Tom Jobim’s Rio de Janeiro 

Dear Tom,

The first time I heard your music was, of all places, at a bluegrass festival in Kansas. My father, a violinist and violist, played there every year with his band. I was perhaps nine or ten at the time, just old enough to stay up with the adults in the jam circle under the Stage 6 tent, where guitarists, banjo players, violinists—I should say fiddlers—bass players, and old men with only a harmonica and personality would come from all over the country to play a rolling marathon of music, trading 8 bar solos until three or four in the morning.

“I was perhaps nine or ten at the time, just old enough to stay up with the adults in the jam circle under the Stage 6 tent, where guitarists, banjo players, violinists—I should say fiddlers—bass players, and old men with only a harmonica and personality would come from all over the country to play a rolling marathon of music, trading 8 bar solos until three or four in the morning.”

One of those nights, someone suggested that they play The Girl From Ipanema. It may have been a Portuguese guitarist, who rolled his own cigarettes, and asked me one time if I wanted to smoke. When they started to play, I could feel, even at my age, what you wanted your listeners to feel: the melancholy, the sense of observing something so close and so beautiful but knowing that you will never have it nor be good enough for it. This resonated with me, I suppose, because throughout middle-school and at the beginning of high school, my attitude was an angst-ridden iteration of this feeling; I always admired from afar, and never had the courage nor thought myself attractive enough—in all of our lives this is the time when artifice begins to reign—to approach the girls with whom I was infatuated. I remember, though, after that September night in the grasslands of the American midwest, that you, a Brazilian composer who died on my one-and-a-half birthday, the same date on which John Lennon was murdered in front of The Dakota and Beethoven’s Seventh premiered, made an impression on me that would last until this day.

The song, as popular as it was, reappeared periodically as I went through the motions of growing up. I stayed an active musician for the first two years of high school. But then something changed: I was rejected from the school’s most prestigious choir. It seems so trite, but it’s now something I’m greatly thankful for, because it allowed me to devote my time to debate, to intellectual pursuits. The music was still there—this is when I learned to play guitar well—but it would never again consume me.

Sometime in my Junior or Senior year, because of my father’s influence, I began listening to your Bossa Nova again. The mirage, cet obscure objet du désir, of Ipanema’s beauty, the breeze and waves of Rio, snuck back into my subconscious, through Desafinado, Aguas de Março, and Corcovado. Freshman year of college I took a classical guitar class, and all but ignored the course material to make time to learn how to strum as you and Gilberto once did. My Spanish had reached a high enough level that I began to devote my time to French. And after I decided to transfer to Georgetown, where I now attend, I knew I wanted to learn Portuguese, to see the world you saw sang of it, in plain, untranslated verse. Bossa Nova, and a vague sense that it was the logical next step, were the only reasons I learned Portuguese. Above all I learned it for you, and for Vinicius.

“Bossa Nova, and a vague sense that it was the logical next language, were the only reasons I learned Portuguese. Above all I learned it for you, and for Vinicius.”

This of course had a downside: what I knew of Brazil, and of Rio, was the privileged world of the pequena-burguesia, not the police brutality and state violence, the drug wars, assaults and murders of tourists, growing before the World Cup, or the passionate political engagement born in response to these horrors. The limited Brazil I had idealized from your songs was what drove me, when I had to plan my study abroad, to forgo an entire year at the Sorbonne for a split year between Strasbourg and A Cidade Marvilhosa.

“The Rio de Janeiro I know is paradox, at once welcoming and apathetic to my existence, wild and preternaturally relaxed. It is abject poverty and exorbitant wealth, often within a hundred meters of one another.”

After almost four months here, I am, in many ways, still searching for the fantasy I created listening to your music for the first time that Kansas summer night. The Rio de Janeiro I know is paradox, at once welcoming and apathetic to my existence, wild and preternaturally relaxed. It is abject poverty and exorbitant wealth, often within a hundred meters of one another. It is sexual and religious, liberal and conservative, repressed and open. It is the Dionysian of carnaval, which I don’t understand well, and the Apollonian of the Brazilian university life, which I also do not comprehend. It is torrential rains, like that which falls outside my window as I write this, and the invincible heat of summer. It is sunsets from aporadoar and sunrises from Vidigal, Lapa samba and Lagoa clubs, sincerity and superficiality. Ironically, I speak more French here than Portuguese. It is a city that I love, and also a city I hate.

I have a few trips to make before the end of the semester, and there is always more to see in Brazil and this city itself. But, you and I both know, Tom, that I cannot really know Rio de Janeiro until the very end. When my bags are loaded on the plane, I have taken my seat, the engines start, and we lurch forward and rise above the beaches and hills, looking down at your marvelous city, only then will I feel about Rio that which I now feel about those warm September nights in a Kansas field where I first met you: saudades.

You and I both know, Tom, that I cannot really know Rio de Janeiro until the very end. When my bags are loaded on the plane, I have taken my seat, the engines start, and we lurch forward and rise above the beaches and hills, looking down at your marvelous city, only then will I feel about Rio that which I now feel about those warm September nights in a Kansas field where I first met you: saudades.