The hurricane
We lived on Rua Leovaldo Barbosa dos Santos, Água Branca, Ilhabela.
Neide, a friend of ours for over 30 years, spent a few days and even weeks there with us whenever she could.
She is my companion in the night brews. I, after two or three, always move on to something more responsible, a Natu Nobilis, sometimes a vodka; she always in the beer.
We got careless and beer inventory was below minimum stock; the sky began to darken and we decided to leave quickly for the Frade Supermarket’s branch nearby, a kilometre or so from the house.
And there we went with Lill Tomato, a Gurgel I inherited from my son Pedro when he moved to a hole in Mantiqueira, South of Minas.
Almost there, a gale started and we ran under the cover of the market.
The Market closed due to lack of energy: the generator did not work. And wind and rain that God gave; we ran to Tomatinho and then went to the main Frade Market in Perequê. Closed and dark, like the streets, all the shops; clay and zinc tiles, branches, debris, completely flooded track.
Yeah… today we’re going to run out of our beer.
We returned along the most familiar path of mine, the first street on the right, after the Carne de Sol Restaurant and Lanchonete, also in the dark and empty.
In the middle of the street, I saw a puddle of water and, as I knew its topography well, I put the car in first gear and sent embers; the little puddle had turned into a well! Tomatinho couldn’t take it.
Water four inches inside, I jumped out and… hip-level water!
Neide stayed inside, stepping on the clutch, I bent back pushing. The cell phone fell into the well! I searched in the dark… and found it!
I returned to thrust; a car headlight shone behind, a man came out, shouted for me to wait for him, he joined the strength of a big young man to mine as an old man, old man, but, for my age, reasonably strong.
We managed to get out of the deepest part, I went in, he pushing; instead of turning right, I turned left and left the car on Rua Maria Melânia, out of traffic.
Neide was already beside our saviour’s big and tall van, waving at me; I arrived and I almost couldn’t believe it: it was from Ricardo, Pedro’s friend, who used to be our neighbour two houses down from ours on Rua Leovaldo, with his wife and little son on board!
He entered the up to the huge tree that had fallen to the right, knocking down the front wall of Mr José and opening a passage through his garden.
Thank you, Ricardo and, under the light of the headlights, Neide and I passed through the garden, only to find ourselves faced with impenetrable branches from another tree, low and high voltage wires on the ground.
We returned with the light of our cell phones to the little bar on the corner, up there, almost in front of the Água Branca Market.
It was open, two men at the little table near the counter, to the right, dimly lit, but lit (!) by the battery-powered lights of the food and drink display.
We couldn’t communicate with Julieta, who was certainly very worried: my Claro cell phone service and Neide’s Vivo were down.
Right away we ordered beers, any beer, it was gone. The waitress said the owner had gone to get more. We were freezing to death, I ordered a brandy, Neide held on.
Needless to say about the quality of the thing…, but I took a few more sips anyway, got better a little and took the cigarette pack: soaked.
It’s a good thing women use a purse: I sawed Neide’s while smoking at the door, hidden from the drips on the roof; impossible to hide from the wind, now normal but cold.
The owner arrived on a motorcycle with her precious cargo. I discreetly threw the “brandy” into the vase by the door, to give the plant a boost.
There we were waiting for who knows what, maybe we had to sleep there.
In addition to the ones we drank, we bought eight beers and left them in the fridge.
And Sandro, our neighbour from the penultimate house, almost at the creek, arrives with a flashlight and machete and tells us to accompany him.
Sandro, a person as kind as he was thick, had been a policeman and now worked at the city’s traffic department; he knew everything and everyone.
After getting our bags, Neide and I, each with 4 cans… We followed him: he had opened a passage in the treetop.
− Oh! Look at the high tension cables! Neide shouted.
− Don’t worry, Elektro has already cut the power to the region; in fact, the tree that tore down Mr João’s wall fell on the transformer and destroyed it.
We arrived; Julieta had already left the gate unlocked lit candles inside the house, and in the back area; we passed through the corridor on the right, over branches, a carpet of leaves, pieces of bricks and tiles everywhere.
Joy and relief at a distance, without hugs and kisses; straight to take off clothes, a cat bath, dry ourselves, put on dry ones, without a shower: the energy would only come back in 5 days.
The well-built house, the roof that we had to completely renovate right after the purchase, held up very well; only a few tiles from the eaves had fallen, and the broken bricks were from the house next door below. But cleaning! Two days at our house, the following days joining the neighbours to throw branches off the street, hoes and shovels to remove mud.
The City Hall took two days to come and saw the immense trunk of the first, another one to open a narrow way for the passage of Elektro trucks, had already ordered a pole for the installation of a new transformer. In two days with specialized teams for each task, redone the entire network, at the end of the second the high voltage was on, electricity back again.
I went to the place where I had left the car, started it and… the brave Gurgel picked it up right away; the prodigal son, I say, prodigy, returned to the house.
The narrow passage stayed there for almost two months until the city hall was kind enough to open the space for the carriageway.
Four months later, Mr João’s wall was still on the ground!
We only learned about the severity and extent of the damage days later; winds of 125 kilometres per hour: it was a small class 1 hurricane, but for those who live in Brazil, it was a big hurricane. Three hundred trees felled, many small, medium and large vessels, expensive yachts, dragged, crashed, sunk.
Actress and model Caroline Bittencourt, was with her husband on the bow of a yacht, was dragged and fell into the sea, idiotically without life jackets. Her husband threw himself right away but couldn’t save her.
A boat with a couple and a two-year-old child capsized, they succeeded to release the rubber raft. Men in a fishing boat were trying to cross the channel between Sao Sebastiao to Ilhabela, rescued and saved them.
The residents of our street got along very friendly, four houses belonged to relatives of the same family. Misfortune has brought us all closer together.
A lesson:
Never let the beer reach the minimum stock!