Setback terrace view

Vista do terraço by Chico Lima

Versão em português
Version en français

I’ve already written a lot about my mother, so little about my father. Many times I tried and ended by giving up. Several uncles and older cousins said to us, his children, that we have not known our father in all the vigor of youth. No doubt about it, he got married at the age of 42 years. The advantage we can find for ourselves is maturity. Too bad it was short lived, because his illness started when we were still young. But he accomplished his mission as a father with precision and extreme devotion, in top form when we most needed him to provide us with good education.

I do not want to lengthen too much about his qualities and his accomplishments, because the human being I have known was not at all someone who liked to boast about his gestures. However, it would be unfair if I did not mention his humanitarian and scientific activities, his actions to help not only his large family but also so many poor people of an ancient, indigent, underdeveloped, savage Brazil. All this without fanfare or trophy, but he had the gratitude from those he helped, and the admiration of those who knew him.

A virtual visit to the setback terrace of a friend's house led me to write this text. There we can have a wide view of mountains and trees, with an immense sky available to eyes receptive to wonders, without any building to disturb the spectacle. My father liked houses with a terrace like that and he built ours this way.

Ah... This brought back so many memories! The harmony of the couple eternally in love provided us with a solidly secure environment. Our "Google", our encyclopedia, he knew everything. The research for the school homework had a voice and drew as needed. The readings and discussions of philosophical and literary themes which my elder sister – whose intelligence was already manifested in abundance since her youth – used to make my father patiently listened to, although he fully knew all those things, but he was certainly proud of his daughter. I learned a lot by listening to their conversations!

As for the music, he played a little, yes, guitar, piano and violin. When it came to listening to the violin, we did not want him to stop because, once locked in the wardrobe, the instrument disappeared from circulation for a long time – because it was not a toy, he was very jealous of his violin. He played guitar more often, and even me, without any talent for music, I received a few lessons from my father. Less than basic, but the chords seemed elaborate, which made people laugh at the little girl with her guitar, also small.

Ah! The piano... he played the piano on the rare occasions when the doors of my grandmother's living room were open to the public. He had begun to make a piano, at home, but he never finished it.

The older children have known him when he was more vigorous, of course. He was beginning to weaken over time. Despite this, my younger brother remembers many lessons learned from him and still remembers how he stressed and repeated that all human beings are equal. This was marked in his memory. There have been many joyful moments with younger children as well; amused, and not willing to let him for a single moment, their father had to ask them to recite numbers until the time the circumstance required, in order to keep them occupied until he left the bathroom.

One of the best gifts he gave us was the lessons on how to extrapolate, within the unshakeable universe of his faith. To give an example, coming back from a catechism lesson in our parish, I had lots of questions about the images drawn to represent God, Adam and Eve in Paradise. In a few words, he sensitized me to the imponderable, when he explained that we can not know how God is, neither Adam nor Eve. These representations in images were only to make it easy for our little human mind to understand. He knew that children could capture ideas without preconceived ties, more freely than adults. He did not save us from thinking, and that's good.

My father liked a starry night; he used to go to the slab of the first floor of our house and, after the construction of the second floor, to the terrace. He showed the constellations to us, he gave us the notion of the universe immensity. This way, I learned this fascination for feeling my smallness vis-a-vis the immeasurable, when I look at the sky; I learned to understand that there is the incomprehensible.

I think that a wide view of the sky and Earth is the image that better represents my father, either in the obvious sense or metaphorically. It is on the terrace of my memory that I visualize him, the gaze towards the infinite, mine in his.

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Yvon Rodrigues Vieira

Yvon Rodrigues Vieira, born and died in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil (* 23-02-1905 + 15-02-1979), was a medical doctor, anatomopathologist. He worked at the Department of Anatomical Pathology of the UFMG (between 1927 and 1936); physician at the Instituto de Cegos São Rafael; physician at the Public Service of the State of Minas Gerais; Co-founder of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Co-founder of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of Minas Gerais, professor of Histology and Embryology, and Legal Medicine at the School of Law; Member of the Board of Directors of Sociedade Mineira de Cultura, institution maintainer of the Catholic Faculties of Minas Gerais; anatomopathologist at the Central Laboratory of Hansen Disease Department of the State of Minas Gerais, until the year of his retirement in 1963.

Some references found on the Web, for illustration purposes:

http://site.medicina.ufmg.br/cememor/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2016/11/TURMA_1926.pdf          
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http://site.medicina.ufmg.br/apm/sobre/   (ver Histórico)                                                                         

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http://rmmg.org/artigo/detalhes/566                                                                                                          

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http://www.wikiwand.com/pt/Faculdade_de_Ci%C3%AAncias_M%C3%A9dicas_de_Minas_Gerais#/O_primeiro_corpo_docente  (ver em O primeiro corpo docente)

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http://portal.pucminas.br/centrodememoria/documentos/relacao-documentos-transcritos.pdf

(page 103, doc 54)

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http://portal.pucminas.br/centrodememoria/acervos/87.jpg

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http://ila.ilsl.br/pdfs/v16n3a08.pdf
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  http://hansen.bvs.ilsl.br/textoc/revistas/brasleprol/1946/pdf/v14n2/v14n2not.pdf  (pág. 1 e 4)       
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http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/Hotpage/HotpageBN.aspx?bib=313394&pagfis=115927&url=http://memoria.bn.br/docreader# 

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http://www.snh2011.anpuh.org/resources/anais/14/1298924135_ARQUIVO_lepraouhanseniase-anpuhSaoPaulo-LeicyFranciscadaSilva.pdf (onde se lê "reticalocitose", leia-se reticulocitose).

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 https://www.pucminas.br/centrodememoria/documents/inventario-dom-antonio.pdf
( inventário de correspondências recebidas por Dom Antonio dos Santos Cabral, incluindo Carta de Yvon Rodrigues Vieira, em 10/12/1948: aceitação do convite para a Regência da cadeira de Medicina Legal da UCMG)