The long read: As a sociologist, my career couldn’t be further from that of my father, who spent his life on the road as a truck driver. It’s only in recent years, as illness has struck, that I’ve started to truly understand him
I hear my father’s words every time I catch a flight from São Paulo’s main airport. And while I always remembered those words, it has taken me some time to truly understand them.
Eight thousand kilometres separate the two cities. This number failed to impress him. He had covered hundreds of times that distance over five decades as a truck driver. My father studied until he was nine, worked on the family’s small farm from the age of seven, moved with them to the city at 15. He was only 22 when he became a truck driver. He started driving trucks in 1965 and retired in 2015.
A good proportion of the clothes my brother and I wore during the first 20 years of our lives had been bought second-hand, donated by an uncle or aunt or some family friends, or purchased at charity jumble sales. My mother, whose work as a seamstress helped with household expenses, always made a point of keeping them impeccably clean and repairing any blemishes. The newer ones were “church clothes”, the older ones for wearing on weekdays.
I started planning a journey across the entire Trans-Amazonian Highway . I ordered three maps of the region, the huge ones that you have to fold and unfold, as well as detailed road maps which showed the smaller roads that cut through the rainforest, those asphalt anti-rivers my father helped build in the region he traversed for decades.
A rapid Google search explained that “adenocarcinoma” is the medical term for a certain kind of tumour that affects epithelial glandular tissues, such as those in the rectum, as was my father’s case. This was the first of many words to enter our growing family lexicon over the months to come. Illness is not simply a biological phenomenon, but also heralds a new kingdom of words, a mesh of vocabulary that colonises our everyday language.
My father travels with this new passport. The imprints he now bears and the rituals to which he is subjected – the perennial colostomy bag, the intermittent urinary catheter, the frequent hospital visits, the operations – all signal his citizenship of the world of the sick.
The fragile condition of his heart means the doctors cannot carry out the extensive surgery to remove the tumour. Or at least that’s what the first surgeon concluded, but we’re rarely fully convinced by the medical pathways set out before us. Where health is concerned, doubt becomes a permanent condition. We never felt persuaded they couldn’t operate and remove the tumour, while also being terrified this was indeed the case.
Despite my curiosity, I am not writing about my father to “set the record straight” or give precise information about the places he visited, the people he met, how much he earned and owed. This particular father’s story cannot be told that way: he does not exist.
400km on that train wagon. The train had five wagons and a steam engine, powered by logs. At each stop they had to refuel the engine with wood so the combustion engine would work.
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