I met Nino in early 1968, when both of us served the Brazilian Army at São Paulo's CPOR (Centro de Preparação de Oficiais da Reserva) on Rua Alfredo Pujol, in Santana. We both started serving as a soldiers in the first days of January; I served as a Nurse and Nino as an Infantry soldier. We soon became fast friends during and after we left the barracks. Sometimes we stayed apart from each other for a few months but we always came back together again.
Some time after we left the Army, I made known to Nino I had a plan to travel abroad to live in the USA. Nino jumped at the idea with passion. Actually, he told me his family had been on the verge of moving in with Portuguese relatives of theirs who lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts when, circa 1964, rumours abounded in rightwing circles that Brazil was about to become a Communist country following the example of Cuba and its revolution of 1959.
Nino hailed from a conservative, Presbyterian family of Portuguese extraction. Nino's real name was Antonio Gonçalves Filho. His nome-de-guerre at the barracks was Soldier Filho. His mother Jacira, was the guardian-of-the-faith in the family. I met her a few times and I thought she was a true Calvinist with a religious bias.
I ended up traveling to the New York, USA by myself on 1st October 1971. Nino followed me four months later having directed his feet to San Francisco, California, where he was the guest of José Luís, a Spanish young man he had met in São Paulo earlier in 1971, who was on his way to settle in Northern California.
I think the biggest thing I learned from Nino - and I learned a lot of things from him - was to buy me a cassette tape recorder which had been introduced in the market recently (1971) and tape songs straight from radio stations instead of spending hard-earned cash buying vynil records which were expensive and difficult to carry around.
