Três trópicos da tropicália

the education of a tropicalist

My father was a great businessman. He built 18 hydro-electric plants in the southwest region of Bahia. My mother went with him. The marriage was a business. She looked after the five male children. I was, as they say, ‘brought up on hot chocolate’ in terms of culture, that is, I was overfed. In the first place, my father was a very well-educated man, spoke several languages and made us study from a young age. The professor Anísio Teixeira was my uncle and even featured on a money bill. He was the guy who reformed education in Brazil. In Bahia, I had a very special education, even intellectual. Another uncle, Nestor Duarte, one of Brazil’s greatest legal experts and also a novelist, took my education upon himself. I was a student of Martim Gonçalves, at the Theater School of the Federal University of Bahia (UFB), at the time of the rector Edgar Santos. That was why Caetano admired me from the start, because I was part of that first experimental generation in Brazil. I won a scholarship from INEP – Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais (National Institute for Educational Studies and Research) given by Anísio Teixeira and went to Rio de Janeiro. What happened was that I left Bahia a little before the rest of the guys, at the end of ’59, beginning of ‘60, and the rest came afterwards. Caetano and the gang only came to Rio after ‘64. That’s the only difference.