got water from wells and washed their clothes in streams. Whole families squeezed into self-built two-room houses. Lula's had been built by his father and uncle, with a wooden roof, a cement floor under the main room, and beaten earth elsewhere. Cobras would sit on the roof. There was no radio.
Surplus produce barely stretched to buy essentials, such as clothing or salt, and game was hunted to add to the diet. Brazil may have been among the victors in World War II, its expeditionary force coming home from Italy to a country that was sick of its semifascist Estado Novo regime, but in the northeast, regularly stricken by droughts, there was often hunger.
When she felt her labor pains beginning, Lula's mother, Euridice Ferreira de Melo, asked her brother-in-law José to fetch a midwife from Caetés. He was thin, she was large, and they fell off the horse more than once on the way back; by the time they arrived, Lula was in the process of being born. His mother was thirty. Her eldest son, José Inácio, known as Zé Cuia, was nine; Jaime was eight; Marinete was seven; Genival, known as Vavá, was six; another José—later known as Frei Chico because his baldness made him look like a monk—was three; and Maria was two. Two other babies had died before Lula's birth; Lindu also lost twins later, after Lula's birth. Large families and child mortality were sadly common in an era prior to birth control and in a region lacking health services.
What Dona Lindu did not know, when she cried as she waved her dry-eyed husband, Aristides Inácio da Silva, off on foot to pick up a paude-arara in Garanhuns to find his fortune in the southeast—he had sold two horses to raise the fare—was that he was not leaving alone. He was traveling with a young female cousin of Lindu's, Mocinha,6 already pregnant, with whom he would raise a second family. Nordestino migrants to the richer central south often started second families. In the case of the da Silvas, this led to trouble.
Although Aristides sent money back for Lindu, which was crucial for two years when her smallholding was wracked by drought, he did not return to the northeast even to visit until 1949. He had won funds for a trip from jogo de bicho, the illegal but popular gambling game, and he brought his second wife and their two sons back to Pernambuco to see their homeland. Although he kept Mocinha apart from Lindu, Lindu felt humiliated, and Vavá made a point of throwing his well-dressed halfbrothers into the nettles. They did not come again.
Nonetheless, Lindu accepted Aristides. He made her pregnant once more, with Sebastiana, or Tiana, who was baptized as Ruth. Lula therefore met his father for the first time when he was four. He was not to get to know him until he was seven, and he was only to live with him for three rather unhappy years altogether.
A certain amount is known of Lula's antecedents. His paternal grandfather had land in Pernambuco and, according to Lula himself, was very mean and died poor. His was a common Portuguese surname. On his mother's side, Lula had a grandmother who was a dressmaker of Italian origin, who drank too much. It is generally supposed that, as with other northeastern families, there had been intermarriage with the local natives (usually called Indians) in the past. Aristides looked like a caboclo, a rural man descended from a mixture of Indians and Portuguese. Lula's parents were poor and illiterate, and, though his father had some admiration for Getúlio Vargas (the former dictator who came back to be elected as president in 1950), they showed little interest in politics.
During his formative early years, Lula was brought up by his mother, brothers, and sisters, particularly his older sister Marinete. He adored his hardworking mother, a woman who never had enemies and who was loving without being demonstrative with her children. She was blueeyed and physically strong, but a tough life and modest diet prematurely aged her.
It may not be right to describe Lula as her favorite child, though he may have had some advantages as her youngest son. But she seems to have spotted something about him—a kind of energy, if not exactly a gift for leadership—quite early on, and she strongly encouraged his education when she could. The family was poor, surrounded by other poor families, and therefore not always aware of its poverty. Lula does not remember having had much fun in his early childhood.
His life changed when he was seven. In 1952, his mother brought the whole family down to Santos, where his father was working at the port as a longshoreman. He was loading sacks of coffee (then and for much longer Brazil's principal export) onto the ships. This was hard manual labor. Aristides became too fond of alcohol and tried to conceal his illiteracy by buying newspapers, which he sometimes pretended to read while holding them upside down.
Aristides probably never wanted his first family to come south, and implied that the only member he would have liked to see was a favorite dog, who had had to be left behind. On a second visit to the northeast he collected his son Jaime, who then wrote to Lindu without his father's knowledge to say that Aristides wanted them all to join him. Lindu, telling the children that it would be better to die of hunger in São Paulo than in the northeast, sold everything and bought a ride on a pau-dearara. Vavá, hiding in a tree, did not want to leave home.
The journey south was a classic migrant story of the era, lasting thirteen days and nights from 10 to 23 December 1952. Altogether eleven members of the family were on a crowded truck covered by a canvas top—Lindu and seven children, plus an uncle, his wife, and their son. Lula wore the same shirt throughout the trip.
This was Lula's first expedition away from home, and on it he caught his first sight of a bicycle, a car, and a truck. They started from Tonzinho's, a bar and corner shop, where they had to stay overnight because the paude-arara was behind schedule. On the journey they slept in the truck, in the open, or at gas stations; Lindu had packed chicken and biscuits, and they also lived off farinha (manioc flour), bananas, and jerked meat; they were chased by cattle; Lula and Frei Chico were nearly left behind when they stopped to relieve themselves, and had to run behind the truck at night for a half mile before they were spotted; they washed every three or four days. It was a huge adventure: sixty people packed together in two levels on an uncomfortable truck, driving on dirt roads, looking forward to a new life.
When the da Silvas reached their destination, the Brás bus station in São Paulo, all eleven of them piled into a new Chevrolet taxi and drove down to the Santos docks in search of Aristides. He was not particularly pleased to see them—he was living with Mocinha and their children—but rented a place for them to stay. This opened a new chapter in the life of the dysfunctional family. It offered the prospect of greater freedom for Lula, and this was the point at which he ceased to be a rather ignorant country child and began to grow up as a streetwise kid, close to Brazil's industrial heartland.
Lula never liked his father. He saw him as tyrannical, stupid, alcoholic, and favoring his second family over his first. When drunk—and he was overly fond of cachaça, a type of rough sugarcane liquor—he would beat his family, though his second wife and their son Rubens suffered more than Lindu's children. The only good things Lula had to say about Aristides were that he was a hard worker, that he tried to support both families, and that in certain ways he recognized the primacy of the first. Lula's other siblings were frightened of their father, but Frei Chico, who went hunting with him on the weekend, had a rather better opinion.
Lula's memories of his father in Santos, recounted to his biographer, Denise Paraná,7 were largely negative. He gave two illustrations. One was when Aristides had asked Frei Chico and Lula to check on a small boat he had on the River Caraú, the far side of a Brazilian air force base from where they lived. It began to rain heavily when they were going there, they were afraid, and they turned back without seeing the boat. When Aristides came home, Lindu told him that the boat was safe. The next day, however, a fellow worker told Aristides that he had seen someone rowing off in the boat—that it had been stolen. Aristides was furious. When he got home, he beat Frei Chico so hard with a hosepipe that he urinated in his school trousers, and he would have beaten Lula also had Lindu not stood between them. He struck Lindu instead; Lula thought this was the start of her determination to separate from him.
The other
