London 11/11/1989 Saturday
Carmen arrived last night, bringing news, hot from the press, Veja, Casseta, JB, O Globo… The election has become the joke of the century! Sarney, wanting to topple Collor, asked Silvio Santos to put himself forward as a candidate. The idiot accepted it! The PMB candidate sold his ‘sigla’ (acronym) to Silvio Santos. What a mess. Silvio Santos, famous tv personality that he is, went straight into second place. But his candidacy wasn’t official per se, despite him taking part in the campaign. Then, yesterday, just before Carmen left the TSE didn’t approve Silvio’s candidacy. But now it’s chaos, 4 days before the election there is no favourite! I wish I was back in Brazil seeing all this close up. PT (Lula’s party) was involved in some ‘cheques scandal’, but it was all investigated and turned out to be a smear campaign, all lies.
Also there was a complete collapse of a favela in Sao Paulo, which Maluf used as a stick to beat Erudina up with, but it didn’t stick either. I think Lula will make it through the second round. I really hope so!
We moved yesterday evening, well, we came to the new house and brought some things with us, the rest is still at Carmen’s. Our journey here was tragi-comic. On Friday even the three of us, carrying as much as humanly possible, got on the tube. Half way through the a tunnel the tube stops and stays like that for 10 minutes. I kept trying to figure out what was going on and I came up with a thousand hypothesis, except what it really was, as this never happens in Brazil.
Someone starts talking on the tannoy, possibly the conductor. The only word I managed to get was ‘BOMB’, and I froze up to my soul! (Brazilian expression ‘gelei ate a alma’). They suspected a terrorist device in the train we were in. Bloody hell! Everyone looked pale and frozen, and panicked… But very quiet. No one said anything. The train started to move and the voice told everyone to get out quickly as soon as he stopped the train. As it took forever to get to the next station, how we agonised thinking we were going to be blown up at any instant. I was swearing at the driver, who kept stopping all the time… Worst minutes of my life!!! Finally the train stopped and everyone got out quickly, and us with all that luggage… Everyone just stood around, waiting for the train to blow up? I didn’t understand. We also stayed. The platform was packed. After a few minutes another voice says it was a false alarm, wrong information… Fucking hell! Just as well, because if there had been a bomb we would have all blown up given how long we were stuck between stations.
It seems they don’t know how to deal with it despite there being so many terrorist attempts.
We got home and soon after took Carmen back to the station, she had to travel back on her own! The house is lovely, from the last century. Each floor is split into two levels. The oven is quite something. The furniture is outdated and tasteless, but it’ll do. The floor isn’t very firm, it creaks a bit. I’m a bit worried I’ll land on the Jamaican lady’s head if I fall through. But I’m happy with it! Very happy.