My Oldest Friend

My father and mother believed that a good gift for a child was a book. My colleagues from Grupo Escolar – that's what the primary school of my time was called – didn't think so. What they liked was a cart, a wind-up doll, a bicycle, games, soccer balls.

These things were good gifts. They believed that this business of me getting a book instead of a toy was a scam from my father who, poor thing, couldn't spend money on expensive toys.

There were, however, two things that my schoolmates did not know. The first is that I loved books, I really liked receiving them as gifts.

I even trembled with emotion as I opened the package that Dad brought back from his travels, trying to guess the cover of the book that the package was hiding.

The other thing is that my father, too, had read books that marked his life as a boy. One of them in particular Papa had never forgotten. He had read that book there for 10 to 11 years, at his school.

That was in the early 1920s, and he remembered that he found it strange to find a children's book, at school, just for boys to read and not to study. He thought that was the best! And he didn't forget that the book was called “Arizinho Arrebitado”.

He really wanted to find it again to give it to his son as a present, perhaps so that the two of them could read it together and he could go back to his childhood a little.

It had been well over 20 years since he had read that book and he had never heard of it again, lost as he lived in a small town in the interior of Brazil.

Until one day I came home from school with a book I had borrowed from the Grupo Escolar Library. And the book was called “Reinações de Narizinho”.

I asked my father: “Isn't this girl here your Narizinho, father?” And he asked me: “What is the name of the author of the book?” I said: “Some Monteiro Lobato!”

My father's face lit up and, from that day on, Monteiro Lobato and I became friends forever.