The Believers

We played eight-ball. Zeca, who is 58 and balding, with a dapper white goatee, racked and broke, and then lingered by the table. Very early on, he let me know that he was freshly single and (you know how it goes) on the make. As a pool player, he struggled. He'd set his smoldering cigarette on the side of the table, stoop down and squint at the ball, stand up again, consider his angles -- and then, invariably, flub the shot and erupt into laughter. His happiness was unbounded -- and underlain, I learned, by long suffering.

Zeca had studied for the priesthood once; he quit to chase girls. He'd lived in the States before, working as a cabdriver, but his marriage to Thomas's American mother soured so early that he never even laid eyes on Thomas until the boy was 11. He'd moved to Brasilia from southwestern Brazil only a few months before I met him. For the time being, he was editing (via e-mail) a small country newspaper and living with a roommate in a dingy apartment just inside the airplane design. He had almost no money. He was starting over, and at times in the bar he grew distant, his face calm and fixed as he retreated into ponderous solitude. "When you don't see your kids, it's hard, man," he told me. "It's hard. But now my son has come to visit his father!" Zeca patted Thomas on the back, and Thomas ducked his head shyly. "My son," Zeca said. "My son."

Zeca has the gimlet eye of a newspaperman, and he took it as his mission to lead me beyond Brasilia's shiny exterior and show me the bruised, aging city of his everyday life. One afternoon, he invited me to his apartment complex, built illegally in a sector of the city that Costa reserved for athletic clubs. "They built it at night," he said, "as fast as they could. They built one story underground so that the place would not be conspicuous." The complex's owners are still battling the local government in court and, Zeca said, "They'll be fighting for 15 years, which is when the walls -- they're already crumbling -- will fall down anyway."

Eventually, we took the bus out to the suburbs. The perimeters of Brasilia are bursting with newcomers, most of them emigres from the countryside. There are 2.3 million people in greater Brasilia, and one of the largest satellite settlements is called Samambaia. The town did not exist 15 years ago. Now it has a population of 200,000. It is a disparate maze of low metal-and-cinder-block buildings on a flat, dusty red land that is scattered with dirt roads and mangy stray dogs. At 11 a.m., we found only one place to sit down -- a ramshackle bar where a giant bottle of Nova Schin beer cost about 75 cents and a wheelbarrow sat under the pool table. Zeca, acting as my interpreter, began interviewing the old, rheumy-eyed truck driver beside us. "I only have five glasses of gin a day," the man said. "My limit is five."

The man kept talking. I looked over at Zeca, seeking translation, but Zeca merely shrugged. "This guy," he said, "is not very intelligent. He has a very low IQ."

We walked on. We came to a sidewalk store where samba tunes were blaring and two teenage girls stood side by side on a concrete slab, their eyes vacant as they writhed to the music wearing high heels and extremely tight red spandex shorts. "From what I know," Zeca said with a studious air, "from what I know, those are whores."

Just before we left Samambaia, we came upon a stout 59-year-old man, Lourival da Silva, who was standing at the end of his driveway, in a crisp button-down shirt, surrounded by four or five younger guys, all of whom were laughing uproariously at his raunchy jokes. In 1960, da Silva mixed concrete in Brasilia. Later, he helped build the dam that brought Lake Paranoa into existence. "My brother and I came here," he said, "and we built the city from scratch. We worked hard. We broke our backs. And now Brasilia is beautiful. It is a city that we can be proud of, and you watch: One day Samambaia, too, will one day be great."

When our bus got back to Brasilia, I made my way to the grandest spot on the Monumental Axis: the open-air Plaza of the Three Powers. Here there is a marble pyramid, the Juscelino Kubitschek Memorial, that descends to a black pool of water and, beside the water, a dark stairwell that leads down to a sort of foreboding underground bunker. The world's tallest flagpole stands nearby -- a gargantuan column of 20 300-foot-high metal staves topped by a Brazilian flag so big that it could literally drape a three-bedroom apartment.

A flock of gulls swept over me in the gathering dusk, and even they seemed baroque, overwrought in their swooping. I thought of how outlandish Lucio Costa had been, trying to overcome the old gritty realities of urban life and create a new world. His urban plan didn't work by my lights, but still I was moved by how deeply Brasilians believed in their city. The day before, at the National Archives, I had met a young choreographer, Luciano Sartori, who spoke with reverence of Brasilia's construction. "Those first workers," he told me, "they were building a new city, a new generation. They believed in a revolution, in the dreams of rebellious artists. So many guys died for that vision." Sartori was preparing a show that would see 10 roller skaters pay tribute to Niemeyer by emulating his buildings' swooping forms as they wheeled about on the stage of Brazil's National Theater.

Brasilia survives, I think, because of a strange sort of hope. Its citizens still believe they can attain some shadow of transcendence in a place that is, in truth, composed of bricks and mortar, otherworldly ideas and concrete. In touring the city, I'd encountered, I realized now, a succession of believers: a priest who believed in his church; an architect who believed in his city; a man who believed in his son. Such hope is everywhere in the world -- encountering it as a traveler is, really, a matter of just leaving yourself open. Which is what I tried to do on my last day in town.

I went over to Zeca's that afternoon. There was no food in the fridge, so he, Thomas, and I went up to the complex's small outdoor cafe and found seats at a red plastic Coca-Cola table smudged gray with the butts of old cigarettes. We ordered lunch, along with some Nova Schins, and then Zeca played his guitar -- very softly at first, almost to himself, as he twisted his bald head and looked down at the strings. The songs were all old standbys -- dreamy, tender tunes known to almost every Brazilian: "The Girl From Ipanema," "Acontece" ("It Happens"), "Tristeza" ("Sadness"). Zeca played very well, and he sang in a voice that was at once offhand and plaintive, and Thomas, who's a punk rock drummer, swayed his shoulders and sang. He had learned the words, I'm sure, from his father, and now he handled them with something like deference. He sang the words quietly, almost carefully.

After a while, a guy from a neighboring table, pasty-faced and unshaven, lumbered over and joined up. "This guy," Zeca said, "he's a sculptor."

The sculptor fished some used shish kebab sticks out of a box beside the motorcycle parked in the corner and began beating a tune on the table. He handed me my own set of sticks after a while, and softly I began tapping the table myself. The music felt pained and sweet and colored by loneliness when you got inside it, I thought. It was scratchy and fragile -- an old guy's song in the wind -- and a voice in the back of my head said, "You have traveled 6,000 miles on an airplane for this?"

I kept banging on the table. The music picked up. Zeca played "Don't Let Samba Die," and the sculptor sang with him, his voice sodden with passion. Then Zeca broke into a song that he'd learned in the States -- a love song pledging devotion so whole it demanded hyperbole. "Higher," Zeca howled, "higher than the highest mountain." He paused, pounding the hollow belly of his guitar. "Deeper," he said, "deeper than the deepest blue sea."

"Stronger," said Thomas.

"Stronger," said Zeca, "stronger than the morning sunlight. Sweeter, sweeter than . . ."

Bill Donahue is a contributing editor for Outside magazine.