For a year, right after the end of the pandemic, I spent a lot of tire sole crossing the 33 RAs in the square (today there are 35). I drove around six thousand kilometers aboard my 1.0 trying to find the soul of each satellite city to write chronicles about them. At the end of the task, I felt flattened by an immense internal emptiness.
After those six thousand kilometers of emptiness and solitude, of desperately searching for landscapes, environments, events, places, customs, slang, gestures that revealed a Brasilia identity or 33 Brasilia identities, I did find some scenographic beauty but many scenography without any beauty.
It took me a while to understand what had happened. So I was filled with love for Brasília, who wrote more than 4 thousand chronicles about the city, who interviewed more than a hundred candangos from the heroic times of the construction of the Plano Piloto? What, after all, had happened to me? Boredom, exhaustion, irritation and, worse, a hollowness in the soul.
Until one day, still pretending to be alive, I participated in a meeting with dozens of high school students from the satellite cities. They told me (I already wrote a chronicle about this) that, in their dictionary, Brasiliaense is someone who is rich; candango is who is poor and they were neither-neither. And they expressed all this sharpness with adolescent smiles.
Those girls and boys showed me, involuntarily, where that urban non-existence came from that had robbed me of all sense of Brasília that I had cultivated with such ardor for two decades.
Teenagers born in DF who feel neither Brasilienses nor Candangos, because they are separated from the much acclaimed quality of life of the Plano Piloto and rich surroundings. Because they are disassociated from the inaugural meaning of Brasília — built as a gesture of sovereignty by a Nation in search of itself and its place in the world.
It still didn’t exist for some time, to the point of getting irritated by any and all platitudes about Brasília, including my own. Until, in the last three months, I had to delve into the history of one of Niemeyer’s palaces. These were days of reunion and reenchantment — not like it was before. Another way of dreaming, a less dreamy way, without ceasing to believe that what happened in this rectangle of Goiás, interspersed with plateaus, between the years 1956 and 1960, was not just anything.
A city is not created by edict, decree, competition, not even with utopias. In the same way that a country does not emerge from a land invasion. It takes layers and layers of history, of struggles, of parties, of collective memories, of births and deaths in a continuous occurrence in the same territory, in a daily struggle to be part of it as someone who belongs to it.
For many of those who were born here or who have been here for decades, Brasília is much more than a city, it is an enchantment, it is a way of life. Lucky for them, because for the majority of the square’s 3 million inhabitants, Brasília is the Plano Piloto and the DF is a place like any other in Brazil, with the difference that it gives them some opportunity for survival.
As for me, I solved my problem with the help of the teenagers from the satellites: Brasília belongs to the Brasilienses, the Candangos and the Nem-Nem. Brasília will still emerge from the layers of time.
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* This text represents the opinions and ideas of the author.
