The Foolish Hand of Fate
Everything pointed toward disaster, yet it turned out alright.
My sister—desperate, fourteen years old, and weighing barely 45 kg—was struggling to pull our nine-year-old brother back up by his wrists. He was dangling outside the window of a first-floor apartment in Building D, in the Plano Piloto district of Brasília—a residential block reserved for the families of Brazilian Army personnel. They were home alone, and my brother had once again tried to escape through the bedroom window, when my sister spotted those two small hands gripping the ledge, just moments before he would have plummeted to the ground below.
She saved him from the fall, but not from marijuana or his daily truancy from school. My mother worked as an aide at a daycare center run by the Memorial Baptist Church—yes, we are Baptists. We had arrived in Brasília from Rio de Janeiro as pioneers, joining the *candangos*—the construction workers who built the city. There was no asphalt, no recreational facilities, and no decent hospitals; there were only good schools—excellent ones, in fact—but absolutely nothing else for a boy to do.
That set the stage for an infamous childhood and adolescence in that open-air asylum known as the *cerrado*—a landscape defined by a six-month dry season without a single drop of rain, followed by six months of intermittent, day-and-night downpours. During the dry spells, our noses would bleed and our skin would peel. Such was the unheralded, poorly compensated adventure of establishing and constructing an entire city and civilization in just five years—a world record that would be difficult to surpass, even for the Chinese. Prayers, a disciplined life, years of study, dedication to the church, daily devotions, sacrificial treks—like climbing the stairs of the Penha Cathedral in Rio de Janeiro—or undertaking penitential pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida, the Black Stone in Mecca, or the walls of Jerusalem, along with baptisms in the Jordan River, tithing, and solemn vows made to God—none of it makes any difference. Even the Pope needed a surgeon to remove a cancer that God either would not or could not remedy; the Pope himself could not perform a miracle of healing on his own body. There is no such thing as a reward; destiny chooses at random—following rules that no priest recognizes—who will be blessed and who will end up "the chosen one."
The person chosen by destiny in this case never attended classes—he only completed the fourth grade of elementary school—and he never took part in the religious services at the Memorial Baptist Church in Brasília, even though every other member of his family was a devoted participant.
There is no cause-and-effect relationship linked to his success—nothing that self-help books could explain, no formula for success that could be replicated.
I was having lunch at my mother’s house—taking a break from my job as a computer programmer at the Ministry of the Interior—to visit my daughters from my first marriage (I was separated from their mother at the time), when he appeared, shirtless and carrying his skateboard. He was sweating and complaining that Renato Russo had invited his friend Geruza to play bass for a studio recording session with the multinational record label EMI-Odeon, but Geruza didn’t have the money to make the trip. So, he had just extended the same invitation to my brother—lamenting his own bad luck, convinced he would lose out on the opportunity simply because he lacked the funds. I got up from the table, drove him to the Transbrasil airline office, and bought him a one-way ticket. I also gave him a credit card to cover his expenses on the way to Rio de Janeiro, telling him not to come back home unless he had the record—recorded with his rock band, Legião Urbana—under his arm.
This is the brief biography of a former member of Legião Urbana—the biggest and most famous rock band in Brazil, with over 5 million records sold and a long history of success that has endured even after the band’s end.
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