The other day I was having lunch in my small terrace that looks down the dead end street where I live, when I heard the cornet of a candy vendor who was passing towards the steps at the end of the street.
Instead of the annoyance these loud interruptions provoke on most people, it came to me the memory of the large number of different types of calls and cries of street vendors that existed when I was a boy.
The first one I remember is the bottle buyer. I could hear from far away his call that stretched the last two syllables and only after a while I saw the man pulling the cart who bought used bottles and old newspapers. They paid very little, but paid nonetheless.
There was also the man who bought used clothes and cried “buy clothes”. It was a more syncopated cry, with a more percussive rhythm. He passed on foot and used a lot of clothes one over the other, besides the old suitcase strapped to his back.
The knives and scissors sharpener played a flute, like the one of the god Pan and his knife sharpener was a contraption with a bicycle wheel that served both ride and, upside down, turned the grindstone. It seemed to have been handcrafted.
The Japanese man from the cleaners passed on Mondays. He always asked with a heavy accent: are there clothes to wash?
There were three types of ice-cream vendors: the one of the horse cart who was called Poi and rang bells. The one of the first factory in Brazil who pushed a cart and shouted the name of the company that sounded as “very tasty”. And there were the homemade ones, made in some backyard, who just cried “Ice-cream!”
In the neighborhood where I grew up there were buildings going up. Early in the morning, at seven, at lunch, at eleven, in the beginning of the afternoon, at noon and at the five o’clock work stoppage call, a sound was made with an iron triangle and a metal rod. They whirled the rod inside the triangle producing a sharp metallic noise in an ever increasing speed.
And there was, of course, the hurdy gurdy. It was a sort of music box with a cage on top and a drawer in the middle full of small cards. In the cage traveled a parakeet that, for a very small sum, would pick one of the cards with his beak. The card brought the fortune and the future of the illustrious client.
These noises have practically disappeared, replaced by old cars with speakers on the roof and pre-recorded tapes.
It is amazing that only at times, we realize how much these small pieces of daily life that are gone take away a little of ourselves with them.
