Let me tell you about my friend, Frankie, who I met a few months ago because of the efforts of Fabio, the man who cut my hair at the time, but who has since moved to another city almost two hours away. Fabio had always been telling me that he had this other client who speaks English and one day he arranged it so that Frankie and I would both be at his shop at the same time.
Frankie was born in Brasil of Italian parents, and emigrated to the US when he was eighteen. Exactly when he was born I am not sure. More about that later. It was a very cosmopolitan family that, at various times, lived in Italy, France and Brasil. His father was an engineer who was involved in the building of railroads. He returned to work in Italy sometime in the 1920s. I was going to write that he left Italy after the rise of the fascists, but since Mussolini took power in 1922, that wouldn´t be accurate. The family also lived in France at one time, probably after they left Italy and before they returned to Brasil. Frankie is a little vague about this because it all happened before he was born. He remembers a trip to the Northeast part of Brasil, as a teenager, in company with one of his sisters, to receive an award and attend the unveiling of a plaque commemorating some achievement of his father. His father was alive at the time, but didn´t want to attend.
Frankie had three older sisters. One was Aida, named for the Verdi heroine, and another was called Nice, for the city on the Riviera. I don´t know the name of the third, only that she was an opera singer who died relatively young of a heart attack. Aida died this past March and Frankie is the only surviving member of the family.
In the US, Frankie lived first in San Francisco, where he worked at various part-time jobs and went to school at S.F. City College, and eventually he moved to Los Angeles. At some point his sister Aida also moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as some variety of nurse. It is possible she emigrated to the US before Frankie. I don´t know. Since Frankie and Aida eventually ended up living together in Section 8 housing, and because I know how small his monthly Social Security payment is, it is pretty certain that neither of them ever made very much money. For many years Frankie taught ESL at LA City College, or maybe it was LA Community College (they both exist).
Sometime in the 1990s, Frankie was involved in a bad car accident on one of the LA freeways, and never worked again. He now gets around very slowly using a walker. Again, I´m a little short on details but he has given me the idea that his frailty was aggravated because of his having, foolishly he now believes, refused some surgery that was recommended back at the time of the accident.
I don´t know if he and Aida lived together before his accident, but they did after it, when he became rather an invalid, a depressed invalid at that, which isn´t too surprising. Frankie has a good, but not a strong, singing voice. At some point, Aida talked him into taking voice lessons at one of the community colleges as a way to get him back into the world and out of the house after the accident. He is very proud of the DVD of him performing before a small audience at the time his graduation, and of the CDs that were burned of him singing.
I believe that Frankie would still be living in the US, but for the fact that Aida became ill a few years ago and wanted to return to Brasil. They lived together in a small town on the outskirts of São Paulo, about an hour away from the city center, where he lives now, and where I live. There was some family connection with that little town. In fact, I think now it was the town where he grew up. After Aida died this past spring, he moved to where he lives now. He may have returned to Brasil because of Aida, but I believe he is glad to be here rather than in LA. He feels closer to all sorts of activities, and less restricted in his ability to get around. In LA there is some sort of public transportation for the physically impaired, but one has to call and wait. It is hard to make plans to do anything at a specific time. Here he can walk fifteen yards from his apartment building to his favorite restaurant for lunch, and just a little further to a market for food, which they will deliver. He has friends up and down the street that he visits with daily. If he needs to go a little further, which is rare, there is a cab stand across the street from his apartment and all the cabbies know him. He can go anywhere he needs to for R$15 or less.
I will learn shortly if he really prefers life in São Paulo, or if he has just been trying to convince himself that he does. He is currently in LA, visiting a couple of old Brasilean friends, both of whom have lived in the US forever. Both of them are trying to convince him to stay there instead of returning to Brasil. He has the minimum of possessions here and could easily stay there if he decided to do so. We´ll see.
When I helped Frankie set up an on line profile to manage his Brasilean bank account, he chose the username of Frankie1930, which he said was the year of his birth. Since his birthday was a few weeks ago, that would make him 79 years old. But he has at other times said he was 72 or, since his birthday, 73. He also told me once that his father falsified his birthdate at some point to keep him out of the army. So I don´t know his age, but I would guess him to be 73 rather than 79. I have had both his Brasilean and US passports (dual citizenship) in my hands and, like everyone would do, I opened them to look at the photos, but I never thought about checking the birthdates.
Frankie is one of the most indecisive people I have ever known, which is one reason I am willing to believe that Marta and/or Lucia will convince him to stay in LA. Before finally booking his flight, he waffled back and forth from day to day whether he really wanted to make the trip or not. Then, when he decided to go through with it, he took several days to decide how long he wanted to be gone...15 days? 30? 45? He finally booked a trip from mid-august to early october. I believe that he was dependent on Aida to make his decisions for him and he is somewhat at sea without her. Whether that was always the case or just became so after his becoming an invalid, I don´t know.
Enough for now. The next installment, which will demonstrate his impracticality, I will call "The Frankie and Marcelo Incident."
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