Death Can Wait: A Survivor Life Story

By Nuremberg Sant'Anna

I didn't want to write this book because, in my opinion, people would not believe my story. After all, I hitchhiked the world without money, visited thirty-five countries, lived on three continents as an immigrant, survived and overcame challenges such as famine, earthquakes and catastrophic hurricanes, ship

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luminare Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643885513

Nuremberg Sant'Anna

Nuremberg Sant'Anna is the founder and CEO of the Brazilian Cultural Center of Hawaii (BCCHI). He played an important role in the Brazilian and Hawaiian communities as well as numerous projects. These include a TV program called "The Brazilian Update" (about Brazilian culture), a Portuguese language course for children and adults called Power With Aloha (POWA) at the University of Hawaii, a website of subjects important to the local communities (bcchi.org), a Brazilian-style soccer academy, and the Tropikalia Samba Show. He also provided support for local capoeira and Brazilian jiu-jitsu schools. The author is currently living in Las Vegas, Nevada, battling for his life with an intensive treatment for cancer metastasis in the middle of a worldwide historic pandemic, COVID-19.

Book preview

Introduction

At the insistence of some friends, and especially my revered current wife, I decided to write this saga based on real facts about my adventures wandering the world looking for something, although I didn’t know exactly what it was.

I didn’t want to write it. In my opinion, people would not believe my story, but a lot of people asked me, Why don’t you write a book about your life experiences? After all, you hitchhiked the world without money, visited thirty-five countries, lived on three continents as an immigrant, graduated from three foreign universities, and graduated from an American police academy, winning a trophy for best new officer, in Miami.

I was also the president of the first and only Brazilian Cultural Center of Hawaii (BCCHI), and I founded the Brazil-Hawaii Chamber of Commerce.

I have many stories to tell. Sometimes even I have difficulty believing everything that happened while I traveled the world. I overcame challenges such as famine, earthquakes, catastrophic hurricanes, a shipwreck, an air accident and motorcycle accident, kidnapping, stabbing, discrimination, racism, prison, depression, panic attacks, and a heart attack. I was lost in the middle of the Amazon jungle. I was poisoned. I even survived the coronavirus pandemic and was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. Doctors removed a brain tumor the size of a lemon.

I’m still alive to tell this story. 

C:\Users\Admin0913\Desktop\Memoir_PersistenceOfFish\Artt\SlacksCove.JPG

Chapter 1

My childhood was complicated. I have only a vague memory of my father. I was raised by my mother and was too young to understand what was happening at the time.

My father, an officer in the Brazilian Air Force, was very strict with his children, and the punishments of my older brothers were severe enough to be cataloged as acts of torture. I remember specifically a type of punishment called the Posture of the Statue of Jesus Christ, referring to a famous statue in Rio de Janeiro. It consisted of standing shirtless with arms open in front of my father, who sat in a chair with a leather belt in his hand. The moment the arms lowered from the fatigue of staying in that position for so long, the belt was violently used on the back, and the lashes were counted according to the degree of the crime committed.

I don’t remember being beaten in such a way. I think I was too small for that, but my older brothers went through it. We were a family of six: my father, mother, three boys, and a girl. I was the youngest. The fights between my father and mother were constant and fierce, and I have no memory of how they separated. I only remember leaving my father’s house in the military village of Governador Island in Rio de Janeiro and going to live with my aunt in a poor neighborhood in São Paulo. All my family was from there. The situation was very difficult for my mother; she had no support from my father, who disappeared without a trace, and she had to raise four children alone.

I was a shoeshine boy in the suburbs of São Paulo to help out at home. I ragged from bar to bar looking for customers for my newest venture. A small wooden box with a brush and rags inside hung on my back. When I couldn’t get customers, I had to go hungry. The chickens running in the machines of the bakeries and bars was, as they called it in those times, the television of the poor. The difficult days went on for months, but my mother—a warrior—managed to return to Rio de Janeiro and register my two older brothers in military college and my sister in a semi-boarding convent for Catholic girls. For some time, I lived alone with my mother.

In March 1964, the military dictatorship began in Brazil. My father was accused of belonging to a subversive communist group during the coup and disappeared. My mother was told that his plane had crashed in the Amazon, but no one could find the wreckage in the jungle, and it was considered missing. My mother started receiving a pension and opened a small beauty salon at home.

I completed my high school studies when my sister was still in boarding school. My older brother graduated from military school but did not want to become an officer. He went to college to study journalism and moved to the state of Bahia. My other brother followed a military career and graduated as a fighter pilot for the Brazilian Air Force. Later we came to know that my older brother discovered my father wandering in a slum in Rio—barefoot, shirtless, with his pants tied with string around his waist. He had been arrested and tortured for years by the military dictatorship. How he ended up in that situation, disoriented and ragged, was not known. Perhaps it was a consequence of the tortures he suffered under the military regime.

Those were difficult times for my older brother, who was a journalist. As the son of a military man who was hunted and tortured by the dictatorship, he developed a repulsion for the current system, and he wrote articles criticizing the dictatorial abuses and lack of freedom of expression. He joined the subversive Diretas Já (a movement for the right to vote) and was chased all over the country. The military threatened him with death, so he went into exile in France and England for a few years.

The seventies were complicated. Our family had been separated for years, and I was living with my mother and sister on Senador Nabuco Street in the bohemian Vila Isabel neighborhood. Our apartment was located on the borders of two famous favelas (slums): Morro dos Macacos and Morro do Pau da Bandeira. My youth there was hard core, and I learned the trickster carioca way. It was a place where a mistake in the streets could cost your life.

In the morning, when going to school, I often found corpses hanging with wires around their neck. They were attached to an electric pole with a poster on the chest and the letters EM. This was the abbreviation for the Esquadrão da Morte (Death Squad), a paramilitary organization that emerged in the late 1960s. Its aim was to pursue and kill criminals considered dangerous to society. It started in the old state of Guanabara. It was led by detective Mariel Mariscot, one of the so-called Twelve Golden Men of the Rio de Janeiro Police, and spread throughout Brazil. Its members were politicians, members of the judiciary, civil and military police, and it was, as a rule, maintained by the business community. The most famous organization was the Scuderie le Cocq, named for Detective Milton le Cocq. According to Wikipedia, it lost importance in the nineties in Rio de Janeiro due to members who acted without control (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuderie_Detetive_Le_Cocq).

In this climate of terror and uncertainty, I still found space to do what I liked: play ball on the cobbled street, barefoot and shirtless, or fly a kite on the roof of my house. All those street games are no longer seen as chop flag, burnt carrion. I was part of the Boy Scouts movement from beginning to the end, the entire hierarchy of the movement. I loved camping and exploring places in the unknown, tropical forests of Brazil.

After leaving the Scout movement, I joined the Alcindo Guanabara mountaineering group. We climbed several peaks and mountains, and that’s when I started to understand my adventurous side. I loved danger and the unknown.

When I turned eighteen, I had to enlist in the military service that I hated so much, perhaps because I was one of the regime’s victims. Raised without a male figure and experiencing hunger because of my father’s absence, it was no wonder that I felt so much hate for the system.

I had a close friend who was my age and in the same situation. He claimed to know an army general who could waive the military service by writing a letter of excuse on our behalf to the recruiting officer. Very well. We got that letter, but when we got in line, an officer said to my friend, You are excused, but your friend will be recruited!

That’s how I spent a year as a soldier in the Brazilian Army. I was in the First CSM of the Infantry Battalion in the São Cristóvão neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Amazingly, it was an incredible year. I learned a lot that has been useful throughout my life, and it was lots of fun despite the rigid training.

In the first months of training, I became friends with my troop commander. This sergeant was strict and was a capoeira martial arts practitioner. I was also adept at capoeira, but there was a big difference between us, not only in the military hierarchy. He was a regional capoeirista, and I was an angoleiro. Capoeira Angola has a slow rhythm that works with the ginga (malice) of the players. In regional capoeira, movements are faster and more volatile. Rotating blows are common. Regional capoeira is the style everyone usually likes, because the blows are fast, and the jumping acrobatics are appealing to the crowd.

Almost every day after military training, we formed a circle to practice capoeira in the barracks indoor soccer court. The sergeant loved to practice with me because of my sneaky, malicious