Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (24 page)

They gave him courage to reflect on the events of the past with less self-pity. What had happened to him since he had left Salvador six years earlier? The nights of “champagne, women, and music” that he had promised himself and that he imagined were waiting for him in Rio had failed to materialize.
Champagne didn’t flow from the faucets, and he could not buy it. But after innumerable binges with Mário Telles and others in the Lapa bars, he discovered that he didn’t really like to drink. Women, well, he had had some—Sylvinha and Mariza, but they were two young girls. Where were the mature women he saw in films, who were talked about in songs? None of them were interested in him. But his main source of disappointment was his career.

No one was aware of his talent more than he, and that was the problem:
he
knew he was good, but that wasn’t getting him anywhere. Contrary to the illusions he had packed in his suitcase on leaving Juazeiro, success didn’t happen overnight, money was short, and he had been compelled to sing things he hated. With Os Garotos da Lua, he had even sung Carnival music. Rio de Janeiro was not Juazeiro, and doors which were open to him as a matter of course in his home town appeared difficult to force open in the big city. He was beginning to admit that he did not have enough self-discipline—that is, professionalism—to succeed in the aggressive and mercenary Rio market. If he really wanted to succeed, he would have to make concessions and do what everyone else did, subject himself to keeping schedules, putting out his hand, asking to be hired, accepting criticism, and swallowing rejection. He would have to bury his pride and allow virtues that, up until then, were not a part of his character, to flower, such as patience, modesty, and tolerance. He would have to become a new João Gilberto.

He developed a sudden aversion to marijuana. In Rio, when the world had seemed cruel and unfair to young unemployed artists like him, it helped temporarily lift his spirits and made everything seem rosier. It was a worthless illusion. Perhaps the drug mixed well with success, but not with failure. In Porto Alegre, where it was difficult to find, and in Diamantina, where he couldn’t motivate himself to look for it, he was obliged to go through life without it—and had discovered that he could survive. If he was ever going to get to where he wanted to be, he was going to have to give the stuff up. Years later, he said that convinced himself to quit when he sang to little Marta Maria.

All of these concerns boiled in his brain, and became the foundation of the man who, barely two years later, would revolutionize popular music with “Chega de saudade” (No More Blues). Obviously, Péricles and Dadainha weren’t being forced to see the bats that were living in his particular belfry and, for them, João Gilberto’s appearance was that of someone who appeared to have more problems than could be resolved by an entire medical council. Despite that fact, he was not introspective all the time. Sometimes he would burst into the living room with explosions of enthusiasm, to show off a sound he had coaxed from his guitar—something which would later become known as the “bossa nova beat”—and this made them even more concerned.

And why shouldn’t it? Picture yourself in tiny Diamantina in 1956, and see if it’s so hard to understand why someone would have such violent mood swings. Joãozinho could go from being entrenched in the deepest depression to a state of euphoria like a lighted lamp—with the ability to regress, in a matter of seconds, as if a cloud were raining right over him, just because he couldn’t get a chord to sound the way he wanted. Who could understand Joãozinho?

Péricles and Dadainha began to think that the best place for him was with their parents, Dona Patu and Mr. Juveniano, in Juazeiro, and began a discreet campaign to take him back there. When they spoke to him about it, he reacted very negatively. The idea of going back to his hometown and his parents’ house, taking with him his sense of defeat, was the ultimate humiliation. But it was a humiliation that he perhaps considered inevitable while chewing over his own failure. Besides, he had no choice. Péricles and Dadainha were going to Juazeiro anyway, to introduce Marta Maria to her grandparents, and they didn’t want to leave him alone in Diamantina.

Joãozinho still didn’t feel ready to go back to Rio, and even if he had, he didn’t have a penny. He resigned himself and went with them, like a child led by the hand.

His calloused soul hurt more than ever in Juazeiro. The city didn’t exactly welcome him with fireworks, and his father took it upon himself to make his two-month stay there even more oppressive. All of Mr. Juveniano’s tedious urgings—that Joãozinho should become a great doctor, engineer, lawyer, or even an important businessman in Bahia—were rejected with utter vehemence, and he had only his disappointing music career to counteract the argument. The difference was that he was no longer a young man of eighteen with a great deal of promise. He was now a man of twenty-five with a mustache and already nostalgic for the sweet bird of his youth.

He decided, at the very least, to be practical. He would not fight with the old man, and now that he was based in Juazeiro, he would continue his search for that new combination of guitar and voice on which he would bet all his cards when he returned to Rio.

Only Juazeiro didn’t provide him with space to practice. He tried locking himself in his room as he had done in Diamantina, but the sounds he produced filtered down to the living room and his father, a
bel canto
expert, was the first person to denounce the future bossa nova with the description: “That’s not music. It’s nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah.”

Mr. Juveniano was now interfering not just with Joãozinho’s choice of profession, but with his actual choice of style. Others in the city echoed Mr.
Juveniano’s disapproval. For those who remembered how the adolescent Joãozinho projected his voice like a song-thrush and imitated Orlando Silva perfectly, that new way of singing—as if each syllable were being delicately slipped out of an envelope—did not seem, at the very least, terribly manly by Juazeiro standards.

Joãozinho had no peace and quiet at home to work, nor did the street offer much refuge. Going to play beneath the tamarind tree was out of the question—the only time he tried it, he felt the contempt of people who heard him. It was the same at the small beach on the bank of the São Francisco river. No one would understand “Bim-bom,” which he had just written, trying to reproduce the rhythm of the washerwomen’s hips when they passed by carrying bundles of laundry on their heads. It was as if, in Juazeiro, João Gilberto were being kept prisoner inside a bottle—in solitary confinement, but in full view of everyone, exposed to public scrutiny. He had to escape from there, to anywhere, even to Salvador—if he couldn’t go straight back to Rio.

Again, for whoever saw him from the outside, his state must have been intriguing. How could they have known that the oyster was making a pearl? “Joãozinho is going crazy,” was what his father started saying. With such a source of authority, the rumor turned into a general consensus of simplemindedness among those who knew him. Joãozinho was not right in the head and needed to be treated. But where, how, with whom? Forget about Juazeiro. It would not do for someone in Mr. Juveniano’s social position to let the city know that his son was in such a state. And he couldn’t lock him in the broom closet. Dewilson, Joãozinho’s older cousin, himself a psychotherapist in Juazeiro, had the solution: he would take him to Salvador for treatment, where there were more resources and no one would recognize him. And there he would have the support of Dona Patu’s relatives.

Thus, Joãozinho and Dewilson once again took the train to Salvador, as they had done when they were kids. This time, however, the mission was serious. Dewilson was going to hand his cousin over to someone who understood what was going on with him, with the latter’s consent and cooperation, of course. On the train, João Gilberto seemed strangely calm about the prospect of being examined by doctors who threatened to peep into his mind and soul. Perhaps he was curious to know what was “going on” with himself, but all he really knew was that he was getting out of Juazeiro. Nothing serious was going to happen to him, and he now had a weapon that no one could take away from him: that guitar rhythm, which totally simplified the samba beat—as if he were reducing the whole rhythmic army of a
samba school
to just the
tamborins
—but that was flexible enough to accompany any type of music, as well as being something new, which is what he wanted.

In those days, Salvador had three facilities for treating mental patients. One of them, the Bahia Sanatorium, on the Politeama hillside, was practically an asylum, with wards filled with men whose main insanity was poverty; another, the Santa Mônica hospital, close to the Quinta neighborhood, was a “sophisticated” clinic where the wealthy, or those whose families wanted a break from them for a while, went. Dewilson didn’t think that Joãozinho was a candidate for either of those places. In his opinion, he was merely disoriented by his failure in Rio and was obsessed with that damn music that no one liked. A few conversations with the psychiatrists would do him good. So he took him to the Salvador Clinics hospital, in Rua João das Botas, and filled out the paperwork, putting himself down as responsible for him, both as a relative and a doctor. João Gilberto would be admitted to the care of a respected Bahian doctor, Professor Nelson Pires, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Bahia, and his team.

He wasn’t exactly admitted, as Professor Pires’s section did not admit patients. And as it turned out, there was no need. João Gilberto went to the walk-in clinic and was submitted to a battery of interviews with psychologists, whom he confused with his ferine and sibylline arguments. Like on the day when, gazing out of the window with a lost look, he commented to one of them: “ Look at the wind tearing out the trees’ hair …”

“But trees don’t have hair, João,” she made the mistake of saying.

“And some people have no poetry in their souls,” he countered, curtly.

If João Gilberto wasn’t already depressed when he went there, he could have become at the sight of the human landscape that surrounded him. His old friend Cravinho went to visit him and found him somewhat melancholy, perhaps sedated by some kind of medication they were giving him. “I didn’t want you to see me like this, Cravinho …” said João.

“Hey, don’t be silly. There’s nothing wrong with you. I don’t know what you’re doing here.”

Apparently, the doctors at the Clinics hospital agreed with Cravinho, because João Gilberto was discharged a little over a week later. Dewilson was given permission to take him away and decided to return to Juazeiro with him, in order to pay his respects to Mr. Juveniano and Dona Patu, and to show them the man who had turned over a new leaf. João Gilberto thought it best to go along with the idea. In a few days, he would be out of there, and on the long trip back to Rio—this time, for good. He would stop over in Diamantina, to pay his own respects to Dadainha and consolidate all that he had learned. He did not know what awaited him, but he was certain of one thing: his music would finally make it in Rio.

At the peak of their partnership: Jobim and VinÌcius at work

Manchete Press

I
n the two years that João Gilberto was away from Rio, getting his head together, the world continued to live life as best it could—winning here, losing there. Witness the case of the great guitarist Garoto. If he had been given a penny every time someone praised him, he would have died a rich man. There wasn’t a single stringed instrument that he wasn’t able to play right off the bat, as Mário Telles discovered when he presented him with a ukelele. It was said that in a single song, Garoto was able to switch between the guitar, banjo, mandolin, and
cavaquinho
, playing one after the other without missing a beat—and this wasn’t just one of those stories that musicians like to tell, because he would do this in the auditorium at Rádio Nacional.

Garoto spent his life moving from radio station to radio station, in Rio and São Paulo, and spent some time in the United States with Bando da Lua in the 1940s; but his bank account certainly never inspired envy in anyone. After spending his life half-broke, he finally began to earn a living as a composer in 1954, winning a contest sponsored by São Paulo city hall, who wanted music for the city’s fourth centennial. The music was the stunted
dobrado
“São Paulo Quatrocentão” (São Paulo Four Hundredth), written by him and Chiquinho do Acordeon. The record sold hundreds of thousands of copies (an estimated 700,000), but as instrumentalist, Garoto only received remuneration for the recording, and no royalties.