Thousands of little paper squares bearing messages, poems, and holy petitions cover the walls, ceilings, windows, and doors of ‘Arante,’ this legendary bar-restaurant in the tiny fishing village of Pântano do Sul at the tip of Santa Catarina Island in Southern Brazil.  It is not exaggeration to say that people from all over the world have left messages here.  Some are yellow and brittle with age, curled and spotted with mold; others were written just yesterday, the week before, or last year.  There are sketches and pictograms.  Many are illegible, the words erased by time. They dangle in chains from the rafters, the light fixtures, or stick to any surface able to secure a scrap of paper.  For the last fifty years they have been accumulating in an anachronistic blog where ‘delete’ and ‘memory fault’ is fading ink or a note drifting free to the floor.  I wonder what message I could possibly add to the collection.
      Arante José Monteiro Filho (Arantinho) is the second-generation guardian of this message heritage, the whispering Babel spirits in the family ‘Bar-Restaurant Arante.’  He scans the note-covered surfaces as if each day is a new reading and some words might just leap from the wall to sit down at the table with him for a little talk.
      “Whenever one falls to the ground I take it home,” he recounts, “and store it in a sack.  I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but I can’t throw them away.”  The last count in the sacks was twenty thousand.  “Lovers have written messages here on their first date then returned years later with their children who write a new message after finding their parent’s note: We are eating fish with Mom and Dad…This place is magic!”
      Arantinho cares for the notes as he does for the tiny fishing village of Pântano and the legacy of regional seafood cuisine initiated by his parents in 1958.  In the days before a paved road linked Pântano to the rest of the island, Arante Monteiro and his wife Osmarina opened a small store for the community, selling fruits, vegetables, drinks, baked goods, eggs, tobacco, and daily meals.  It was called Arante’s Bodega. 
      Pântano itself is a poem.  Still off the beaten track, it is now a favorite stop for gourmands, artists, tourists, the hip and marginal, or anyone who likes the look of a sleepy fishing village and wants to leave a message on the wall.  The tradition began in the early seventies, decades before wireless communication, when vacationing students trekked to Pântano via a dirt track to camp on the beach and the sand dunes.  With no phone connection, visitors began posting notes to inform friends of their arrival and location.  The spectacular coastal scenery, slow-motion ambiance, and abundant local cachaça alcohol cast a literary spell over the bohemian visitors.  The scribbled notes quickly became poems, passionate love letters, sacred petitions, and messages of admiration and gratitude.  Pântano, a secret lotus land, enchanted and inspired visitors to freely share their thoughts.  Many swore to return someday to see if it wasn’t all a dream. 
      Over the years, the notes in Arante have attracted international attention and become a local tradition.  Writer-researcher Paulo Alves spent two years studying more than seventy thousand messages in over a dozen languages, interviewing local personalities, and writing his excellent book, Pântano do Sul, Bilhetes do mundo nas paredes do Arante (‘Pântano do Sul, Messages From Around the World on the Walls of Arante).  One note that caught Alves’ eye is a prayer-message directed to Arante Senior:

      The tide rises on the shore to touch the restaurant’s front steps.  Arantinho eyes the boats swaying in the bay and voices his concern about the future and maintaining local traditions.  An historian and keen observer of folklore, he has designs for integrating a cultural institution into the reputed bar-restaurant.
       “My desire is to protect and develop traditional culture in Pântano and the southern part of Santa Catarina Island,” he says.  He is preoccupied about unplanned development in the area such as the mega-vacation homes wealthy urbanites are building behind the beaches just outside of Pântano but still within view.  He is outspoken and proud of his Azorean heritage, a defining element of Santa Catarina’s history and personality.  Village processions, parties, and feasts mark the traditional Holy Ghost celebrations.  Locals sing foliões and ternos de reis, a tradition that dates from the middle ages.  Azorean traditions have survived for years in the area, due partly from geographical isolation, and are currently highly valued on the island. 

      Arantinho adamantly defends the Pântano region’s uniqueness and believes it is vulnerable to the chic global tourism omnipresent at the northern end of the island.

      “We are unlike the other towns.  I want to protect what is native and local before it is too late.  Even the rice and taste of our fish is different; the pirão sauce and cachaça has our flavor.  Why should everything be the same?” 

      Unfortunately, controlling development doesn’t appear to be a priority for regional authorities.  While lacking a significant tourism infrastructure, Pântano’s population still doubles during summer holidays, deriving a significant source of revenue from vacationers who rent rooms and holiday lodgings from locals and dine at one of the several beachside restaurants.  Fishermen sell their catch and offer occasional boat tours of the bay, rocky points, and offshore islands.  When the summer is over, the visitors diminish, but Bar-Restaurante Arante remains open 365 days a year.  The trick, Arantinho agrees, is to strike a balance between development and protection while affirming local traditions.  In the meantime, he loads a flatbed truck with plastic chairs and tables from his restaurant and transports them to the site of the upcoming Holy Ghost celebrations.

I know that I will love you,
For all my life
I will love you, in each
Farewell I will love you…
For all my life.  (P.T.  August 9, 1997)

 Our challenge is to make love
A life process and…
…that it be infinite while it lasts.

      A candle is lit each morning in Saint Anthony’s shrine in the Arante Café.  I am dying to know if the patron saint of miracles and impossible causes has found a man for Teresa, the wonderful cousin that b.rocha@hotmail.com is petitioning for.  I send off an inquiry to ask how things have worked out.  Does Santo Antonio have email or Facebook?  There is no doubt he is the most solicited divinity in Pântano.  

      “Every day must start with an act of faith, no?” asks Edily, a waitress, striking a match.  She lights a fresh candle, and blesses herself.  Yes, acts of faith and many impossible, if not improbable, causes.  Saint Anthony is overwhelmed with scraps of dry paper that dangle dangerously close to the wavering flame that represents Edily’s daily faith.  Requests for cures, jobs, lovers, happiness, money, and success for Brazil’s soccer team are all demanding the saint’s attention.  The candle diminishes as the hours pass.  Messages crowd the shrine and hungry customers eat fish and drink cachaça.  I can’t help noticing that if a message falls into Saint Anthony’s flame, Bar-Restaurant Arante could catch fire in a flash, fueled by a hundred thousand paper messages.  Such is faith. 

      Famous people have ventured to Pântano to savor Arante’s regional fish recipes:  Lula da Silva, Brazil’s charismatic ex-president, theatre revolutionary Agusto Boal, and Milton Nascimento the international singer.  Pictures of celebrities crowd the walls of Arante along with photos of miraculous tainha fish catches, carnival parties on the beach, letters from dignitaries, penguins on the beach in front of the restaurant, and a lost Chinaman who appeared mysteriously one day at the door, apparently washed ashore like a bottle bearing another exotic message.
      But the real love letter lurking among the thousand messages is the cooking, a fine mix of fresh local fish under the influence of Azorean-Brazilian flavors, along with fresh vegetables, local rice, feijão and pirão.  The cachaça, distilled in the countryside nearby and reputed ‘to separate the body from the soul,’ is always on the house.

If I could, I would stay here forever… (Anonymous. 1993)

      I check my email but have received no news from b.rocha@hotmail.com about cousin Teresa’s hunt for a husband.  No news could be good news.  In chapter 9 of Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Odysseus saves his sailors from the Lotus Land because the fruit offered them by the island natives gives such pleasure and contentment that they have no thought of ever returning home.

      It is time for me to leave Pântano.  The sun returns after two days of rain.  Empty boats bob on the water, tethered to anchors, the Nina and Sou Forte (I am strong) along with Bom Jesus.  I dodge the dogs and climb the hill towards the cemetery for a last look and a different perspective on the coastal beauty.  Tiny fishermen’s houses are perched together on the hillside where the day before I knocked on a door and bought a five-pound tainha fish for the equivalent of two dollars.  I enter the graveyard and notice right away that it is so over-crowded with tombstones and monuments it is impossible to walk around without climbing over the dead.  The previous day’s winds have scattered plastic flowers, ribbons, and assorted graveyard decorations chaotically amongst the graves.  

       As a foreigner, I am uncomfortable about stepping on these resting souls so I squeeze myself into a corner to begin reading names and that’s when I am struck deeply and unexpectedly.  They are the same as those names on the graves near my family in California:  Nunes, Soares, Pires, Costa, Martins, Silva, Silveira, Cabral, Avila, Monteiro, Correia, Perreira, Coelho.  I call them one by one, speaking to each.  Saying hello.  Saying goodbye.  Holding back what keeps rising in my throat.  Suddenly, a man appears from behind a tomb.  I had not seen him bent over fixing the headstone.  I might have thought him a ghost or apparition but he smiled and waved gently to me.  Santa Catarina Island is renowned for sorcery and perhaps the kind ones repair gravestones.

      I find myself next to the broad, black tombstone of José Arante Monteiro and his wife Osmarina Maria, the founders of Bar-Restaurant Arante.  I had heard the story about how after ‘Seo’Arante’s funeral an enormous procession of villagers and vacationers had carried him along the beach up to the graveyard.

      I pay homage to Senhor and Senhora Arante, explain to them who I am, that I enjoyed the wonderful fish in their restaurant, that the cachaça is still free, and the messages, poems, notes, and love letters, are gathering every day in their bodega-restaurant.  I petition the sea-deities to bless and guard them.  The final message I whisper before leaving Pântano is that I will return someday because I know it is a real place and not a dream.   

 Richard Simas, June 2014 

 richardsimas@netaxis.ca

A writing residency on Santa Catarina Island was made possible through the support of Professors Lélia Nunes and Irene M. Blayer, The Santa Catarina Press Association, The Historical and Geographical Institute of Santa Catarina, and the Seo Arante Cultural Institution.