In the Darkroom (36 page)

The chain of happenstance continued. The peasant happened to do the hair of the wife of a U.S. Air Force colonel from Texas—he invited the two hungry young men over for dinner (“Big steaks on the grill!”)—and the colonel happened to be advising the Brazilian government's Institute of Geography and Statistics, which had been trying, unsuccessfully, to convert U.S. Air Force aerial surveillance photographs of Brazil so they could be used to design maps. My father met with the institute's cartographer and proposed a way to reconfigure the images without losing any detail. His method worked, and my father and Tibor were hired into the institute's photographic unit.

“Actually, we
were
the photographic unit,” my father said. “And then, when Tamás came, we were three.”

Tamás Somló had taken a circuitous route to Brazil. With the help of his Swedish girlfriend's father (who was eager to put space between his daughter and her refugee beau), Tamás had obtained a temporary visa to Buenos Aires, where he was stuck for nearly a year washing dishes, until my father landed him a visa and a job at the geographic institute. “I told the director,” my father recalled, “Tamás is an
indispensable
member of the ‘Hungarian photographic team'!”

My father reached for the “Letters from the Past” folder, and the only other piece of correspondence it contained, dated “Rio, 1950”: a letter from Pista Faludi in Rio de Janeiro to Tomi Somló in Buenos Aires. The occasion was Tamás's imminent arrival in Brazil.

I suppose this was another attempt at P. Howard/Jenő Rejtő flair. Still, the debonair and wisecracking voice that sprang from the yellowing foolscap startled me. Where had this gregarious young man fled to?

A handwritten addendum at the bottom of the page read: “Bring addresses of blond women—Tibor.”

At first, the three slept for free in the office. Eventually Tamás rented a room in Copacabana, and my father and Tibor shared a small house on Glória Hill in Rio, beneath the Church of Our Lady of the Glory of the Outerio. Usually, though, the young men were out in the outback, traveling one-on-one with a research scientist or a guide or sometimes entirely alone, photographing the immense ecological and human diversity of the fifth-largest nation in the world. “A lot of these places you could only get to by horseback or plane,” my father recalled. He crisscrossed the backcountry of Mato Grosso, the subtropical jungles of Paraná, the plateaus and savannas of Goiás, and the rain forests of the Amazon, which he and a guide navigated in a tiny wooden boat when a promised ship didn't arrive, all the way to Manaus, where the young István was enraptured to find the Teatro Amazonas, the lavish opera house built with rubber baron money in the late nineteenth century. My father recalled photographing trees “the size of skyscrapers,” rivers that “seemed like oceans.” Other times he would accompany the institute's researchers on their sociological rounds, making a visual record of rubber tappers and cocoa workers, African shamans performing ancient spirit dances, and nomadic gauchos hunting wild cattle in the Cerrado. The last would linger in my father's imagination. “The cowboys would ride on these little horses, and they were covered from head to toe with leather, like a suit of armor!” she marveled. “Their horses wore it, too. They had to or they'd get torn to pieces by the
caatinga
.” Bushes with punishing thorns. “They were like medieval knights. I wanted that uniform.”

“Where
are
your Brazil photographs?”

She didn't know. They had disappeared, along with a couple of large film reels marked “Brazil” that I vaguely recalled gathering dust for many years on a bookshelf in Yorktown Heights. When my father arrived in Brazil, he was still entertaining dreams of a moviemaking career—“the famous Hungarian director!” He convinced the geographic institute that it “really needed a photographic
and
a filmmaking unit,” and he went in search of a movie camera—“a real one, not something for amateurs.” In Rio, he found a former cameraman, an ex-Nazi who had fled to Brazil, with an Askania to sell. My father was delighted. The Askania, then the height of modern technology, was a 35mm camera light enough to carry on your shoulder, and a favorite of one of his moviemaking idols. “The same camera Leni Riefenstahl used to film Hitler in the 1936 Olympics!”

My father's directorial debut was a documentary of a landmark construction project on the São Francisco River, Brazil's first large power plant, the Paulo Afonso Hydroelectric Complex, fueled by a natural 260-foot waterfall. “I had this idea that I'd be Cecil B. DeMille,” my father said. He arranged for a construction crane to hoist him in an aerial lift to film a fancy tracking shot. “Somewhere, there's a photograph of me in that bucket.” He also commissioned a two-seat open-cockpit biplane from the air force base in Bahia. “We flew through a canyon and sometimes we went underground, through these cave tunnels.” Aboveground, they dodged vultures. “If you hit one, the plane would crash—and there were plenty circling around.” Vultures were such a problem, “they even had a saying: ‘
Urubu pousou na minha sorte!
' ” (A vulture has landed on my luck!)

Off-hours, he and the other two young Hungarians played cards at the home of the institute's secretary-general, Christovam Leite de Castro. “A nobleman,” my father said, “and very friendly to us. He was our patron.” When not socializing with aristocrats, the trio trolled for women on the beach and in the brothels. “I got gonorrhea once from one of these houses of ill repute.” My father sought relief in a pharmacy in Rio. “They took me in the back and gave me a huge penicillin shot.” For a while, the three young men were partial to a particular brothel in Copacabana called The Palace. “The name was a bit of an exaggeration,” my father said. The place was a pit. “The ‘madam' was this transvestite named Jesus, and he also ran a bar on the ground floor.” My father, never a big drinker, liked to order rounds there, so “I could yell, ‘Jesus, get me a beer!' ” Tibor got involved with an Indian woman he'd picked up on the beach; her name was Irene, but he called her Inca. She worked in their house as a maid. For a while, my father went out with a part-African, part-Indian woman he met at Carnaval, also a housekeeper, whom he favored because she was “smart and easygoing.”

During the Carnaval festivities, my father dressed up, generally as a French sailor. “I had this very colorful striped polo. I was very convincing, because I was so skinny.” He augmented the sailor image with a pet he'd acquired soon after his arrival: an Amazon green parrot. The bird had a particular skill, learned from a nanny in the neighborhood who was always calling a child: “He could imitate a woman's voice really well!” My father named the bird Loira, Portuguese for Blondie. “Blondie was green, but he had a yellow spot on his forehead.” The parrot lived on the porch of the house—in a cage, but my father left the door open. “Loira could say, ‘Loira wants a coffee.' And I would dunk some cake in coffee, and he would eat it.”

“Were you tempted to cross-dress?” I asked, thinking of Carnaval's ample opportunities to assume any costume without judgment. “Brazil is one of the most sexually relaxed places on Earth.”

My father shot me a skeptical look. “I don't like to be
too
relaxed,” she said. “Anyway, I couldn't. Tibor and I shared the house. And he wasn't that way.”

In 1950, Tibor applied for a visa to the United States and suggested my father apply, too. “I wasn't too keen on it,” my father said. “I was happy where I was.” The United States had a tight quota on Hungarian immigrants at the time, but three years later, the visas came through. “By then, Tibor didn't want to go—but I did.”

A new regime had taken charge and my father's “patron” at the institute, the nobleman, had been replaced. “The new boss was a military attaché,” my father said. “Military men are all horse's asses.” There was another issue. “The new guy didn't like ‘foreigners,' ” my father said. In Hungary, “foreigners” was code for Jews. “I knew it could be bad for me.” He accepted the visa and made preparations to leave.

His Hungarian compatriots remained in Brazil. Tamás would thrive. He went on to direct the news department of TV Rio and launch his own production company, making commercials for Coca-Cola, IBM, and major advertising agencies. Last my father had heard, some decades earlier, Tamás was on his second marriage, to a beautiful concert pianist. “I don't even know if he's alive.” Recently, my father said, she had dug up her old address books and tried all the phone numbers she had for Tamás. They were disconnected.

Tibor's fate she did know, and it was not a happy one. After my father left, Tibor moved in with “Inca.” He continued to work at the geographic institute, but with a listlessness that eventually turned to permanent despair. He drank heavily, mostly whiskey. In 1967, he died from cirrhosis of the liver. Just before he died, Tibor married Inca. He wanted her to inherit his government pension.

“Tibor should never have left Hungary—he was not like me and Tamás,” my father said. That is, not a “so-easily-assimilated” Jew. “Tibor couldn't function outside Hungary. People like him, when the root is cut, they wither and die. I didn't have these problems.”

Yet my father's most treasured memory of Brazil involved a search for that root. On an expedition to the state of São Paulo, he'd heard rumors of a hidden community of a particular ethnicity, flourishing deep in the bush. He hired a jeep driver to haul him down barely passable dirt tracks and, after many teeth-rattling days and false leads, he found what he was looking for: Árpádfalva, Árpád Village, a tiny Hungarian colony near the Paraná River. It was named for the tribal chief who led the Magyar Conquest into the Carpathian Basin.

The village's three hundred residents had immigrated in the 1920s, built a church (named, of course, St. Stephen's) and a school where, for many years, all instruction was in Hungarian. My father was especially entranced by one extended family of Hungarian farmers, so many kinfolk that after he assembled them in front of one of their houses—“a very traditional Hungarian cottage with a thatched roof”—he needed an extra-wide lens to get everyone in the frame. Something about my father's description reminded me of the one picture she kept in her computer folder marked “Family,” the 1943 photograph of the Friedman clan, gathered for Sámuel and Frida's Golden Jubilee.

“I loved that Hungarian family,” my father said, pensive. “I wish I had those photos.”

A few weeks after I returned home, I did a Google search for Tamás Somló's stepdaughter. My father had said she might be in the United States. As it turned out, she was on Facebook. Within a few days, I had Tamás's phone number. He was alive and well and retired in Brasília.

“Your father helped me a lot to leave Hungary,” Tamás told me when we talked. “And to come to Brazil. And to get a job.” My father got him that job, Tamás recalled, by claiming that he was a “seasoned” photographer. (In fact, Tamás had no experience in professional photography and had to do a frantic stealth study after he arrived.) Tamás still had the letter my father wrote to land him a visa. “I owe him a lot.” He suggested I contact a senior researcher at the current-day geographic institute in Rio, who had written a scholarly treatise on the Hungarian trio and the formative role they had played in shaping Brazilian photography. “They brought a new kind of vision to photographing people and landscapes,” Vera Lucia Cortes Abrantes, the researcher, told me when we spoke. “They left a precious legacy.” As it happened, that legacy was now on electronic display. The institute had begun digitizing the photos from that era and posting them on a website.

A half hour later, I was sitting at my computer, dumbfounded by what was before me: the visual record of a body of work that I'd presumed was lost forever, summoned with a few keystrokes. Late into the evening, I typed “Faludi” over and over again into the box marked “Fotógrafo” and downloaded scores of brooding vistas, sun-bleached ports, flea-bitten villages, leathery farmers and cowboys and fishermen, barefoot children with ragged clothes and bloated bellies. They suggested a documentarian's sensibility, WPA, not Condé Nast. The gaze behind the camera was observant, unsparing. The cache included three photos of the extended Hungarian family in Árpádfalva, lined up several rows deep before a thatch-roofed cottage, dressed in faded European frocks, button-down shirts, and fedoras.

I downloaded the pictures and sent them to my father. A few days later, she sent me back an e-mail, with two of the photos attached. One was of Árpádfalva. She had enlarged it several times, my father explained in her annotation, so I could see the details that proved the house to be a “true Hungarian Village Hut.” The other shot, which she captioned “Picture from My Past,” was a photo of the São Francisco River threading through a deep canyon, the river over which my father as a young man had flown all those years ago when filming the construction of the Paulo Afonso dam. In the picture, a canary-yellow two-seater fighter jet zoomed over the canyon. Perched on the far cliff were two vultures, hungrily eyeing the plane. It took me a moment to realize I was the recipient of a gag. My father couldn't let pass an opportunity to Photoshop.