Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro: 25oC, hottish, sunny, and slightly overcast.
It is Tuesday, and my first class back with an old pupil. Dona Vera, I think she is eighty-four years old; she had fallen down a month ago and broke her arm and shoulder.
She was rushed to hospital by her next-door neighbour and her maid and went immediately into surgery the next day. I had visited her two weeks before, but she was very fragile and a little disorientated.
For me, she has aged very quickly in a very short period. This sometimes happens with people. Everything is good; you are living your life normally, then something happens, and you are suddenly not the same person you were before; you become a fraction of the person you were in the past, and I am not just talking about illness or disease that can cause premature ageing.
It just happens; maybe an illness, a disease, or a fall is a consequence of what is really happening to the person. A sign or a warning to show the person or the family what is about to come in the short future.
In the past, I taught Dona Rosa for many years, an old lady who was the matriarch of one of the wealthiest and most traditional families in Rio and Brazil. I would go to her flat in Ipanema and give a class once a week. I enjoyed teaching her and also learned a lot from her.
She had a strong temperament and personality; her family members claimed that I was the only person she respected and listened to. I’m not certain if that was true, but I found her to be an intriguing person to be around and I liked her a lot.
When she was coming up to ninety years of age, she fell, and nevermore she was the same. I visited her to see how she was, but she was a shell of her former self. I think that we all know when our life is finishing, and we are about to die; even if we are not able to express it clearly, we know. Or we know from the look in the eyes of that person who is about to go.
I could feel this when I looked at her; I felt that she could feel the disappointment in my eyes being with someone whom I had loved and cherished in my own way, but now that person is slowly slipping away. The person in front of me was not the same person with whom I had spent so many hours talking in English about life, family, and Brazil.
Time is our most important asset. Unfortunately, most of us do not know how to value it; only when it is too late and then time becomes more of an enemy than a friend. Twenty years can pass in the blink of an eye. Last week, we celebrated Yasmin’s sixteenth birthday.
Jessica is thirty, she has graduated, she has a job, and she is living with Mario. Where has the time gone? Only now am I paying more attention to valuing time; I should have done it much earlier in my life. Once it has gone, it has gone forever.
I gave the class to Dona Vera, if you can call it an actual class because I feel it is more therapy than a class nowadays. It is clear to me that friendship, attention, human contact, and affection are more important than the actual didactic content of the class for her.
I gave her the class in her flat in Copacabana; now that I am not living in Copacabana anymore, I need to take the bus back to Flamengo, and I still needed to give three more classes until eight in the evening.
Yasmin had a light dinner that I had made from leftovers from the barbecue last weekend. Nalva goes to a cookery course every Tuesday evening, so she only arrives home after 10 pm, and by that time, I am already in bed, preparing for tomorrow.
In bed by 9.30 pm.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading my blog. Check out my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
