Zé Ubaldo, 1982

Engineer José Ubaldo Telles served as Technical Director and President of Seneago on more than one occasion. We met through Manoel Inácio during our professional activities. He was a serious man, dedicated to Saneago and to sanitation, a man from Goiás who spoke little, with deep rural roots, married to Mrs. Iraci, and the father of six children.

Around 1983, he owned—or perhaps still owns—a farm near Santa Terezinha de Goiás, along the banks of the Rio dos Bois (I believe it was called Fazenda Alegre). Through great effort, he managed to build a farmhouse with one bedroom for each of his children.

One day he invited me to visit the house, which was still in the final stages of construction but, according to him, already livable. So we went. On the first day, we went fishing in the Rio dos Bois. It was almost unfair—there were so many fish that they would bite the hook even without bait.

There I experienced quite a scare when a fairly large snake, probably attracted by the dying movements of the fish hanging on the stringer, appeared between me and the trail through the woods. It remained staring at me in what looked like a ninja stance for quite some time before finally deciding to let me pass.

What bothered me the most was that I was barefoot. We had a typical farm lunch, visited the Santa Terezinha emerald mine, enjoyed a farm-style dinner, admired the star-filled sky, exchanged idle conversation, and experienced the peaceful silence of the countryside.

The morning after our arrival, breakfast was an abundant spread of cheeses, cassava starch biscuits, arrowroot biscuits, cornmeal biscuits, tapioca flatbread, honey, sugarcane syrup, eggs, fruit—everything produced on the farm under Iraci's supervision. It was delicious. The host sat at the head of the table, his children around it, and the guest beside him. Then Zé Ubaldo asked: So, Miguel, did you like the house? And this laid-back man from Rio replied: Well, Zé, how can you, a lifelong sanitation engineer, build a brand-new house like this with only one bathroom? Within a second, Zé Ubaldo and I were the only ones left at the table, everyone else, including Mrs. Iraci, had gone off to laugh in private. Without realizing it, I had touched on an issue that had already been discussed but never resolved.

Very seriously, Zé Ubaldo replied: "I grew up in a house with only one bathroom, and on my father's farm there wasn't even a bathroom..."

I did not insist. But it seems that, because of that conversation, some changes were made to the project, and eventually each bedroom gained its own bathroom.

As our friend Manoel Inácio (from Pirenópolis, Goiás) used to say: "The folks from the countryside around here are like this: Curraleiro cattle, colonião grass, and the PSD party (traditional, conservative, and reactionary)."

And I would add: a tough exterior with a soft heart.

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler, and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Engineering # written in dez2016 R2026janRc, 2.362 caracters