Remember, your dad helped build this airport so you could fly. I hear my father’s words every time I catch a flight from Guarulhos Airport. And while I always remembered, it has taken me some time to truly understand. The truck driver father visits his home, his wife and his kids. He comes and, before long, leaves again. He always came with his truck, they were a duo, almost a single entity, both too much and not enough, imposing and ephemeral. As a boy, I always wanted them to stay, wanted them to go, wanted to go with them.

He said these exact words when we were on our way to that airport in 2009, the day I left to do my PhD in Sociology in the United States. During the months I spent preparing for the move, I showed him the state of Michigan several times on the map. We calculated the distance between Jaú and Ann Arbor, where I would live for the next six years. My father doesn’t understand the world of universities, is unfamiliar with its nomenclature and rituals. He has only a vague notion of what it means to do a PhD. But he does understand distances.

Eight thousand kilometres separate the two cities. This number failed to impress him. He had covered hundreds of times that distance over five decades as a truck driver. One day he asked me to calculate how many times you could travel around the world with the distance he had covered as a driver.

Could it get you to the moon?

In my father’s imagination, a journey from Earth to the moon is a more solid concept than my life as an academic, teacher and writer.

Words are roads. They’re what we use to connect the dots between the present and a past we no longer have access to.

Words are scars, the remnants of our experiences of cutting and sewing up the world, gathering its pieces, tying back together the things that had the temerity to scatter.

Words were the world my father brought with him in his truck during my childhood. They resounded by themselves – cabin, Trans-Amazonian, trailer, highway, Pororoca, Belém, homesickness – or formed part of narratives about a world that seemed impossibly large. I had to imagine them in all their colours, record them in my memory and cling onto them, because soon my father would leave and he wouldn’t be back for forty or fifty days.

Most of these stories were reconstructions of events he had witnessed or heard about on the road. Others were fantastical creations: the epic hunt for a giant bird in Amazonia, the fable of a sheep he found on the highway and took on as his cabin companion, journeys over the Bolivian border with groups of hippies in the 1970s. Many, I imagine, mixed fact and fantasy. He described in detail seeing UFOs on a highway in Mato Grosso, nights spent in isolated indigenous villages, brawls with armed soldiers, Homeric rescues of trucks that had fallen into ravines.

His name is José Bortoluci. At home, everyone calls him Didi, but on the road he was always Jaú. The fifth child in a family of nine siblings, he was born in December 1943, in the rural part of that city located in the interior of São Paulo state.

My father studied until he was nine, worked on the family’s small farm from the age of seven, moved with them to the city at fifteen. He was only twenty-two when he became a truck driver. I was young, but I was as brave as a lion. He started driving trucks in 1965 and retired in 2015. The country that he traversed and helped to build was very different then from how it is now, but in recent years there has been a sense of familiarity: a country seized by frontier logic, the principle of expansion at any cost, the ‘colonization’ of new territories, environmental vandalism, the slow and clumsy construction of an ever more unequal consumer society. Roads and trucks occupy a key position in this fantasy of a developed nation in which forests and rivers give way to highways, prospecting, pasture and factories.

The truck would bring my father, his dirty clothes and not enough money. My mother would agonize and work overtime altering clothes while looking after her two sons.

I am the oldest son. I understood from very early on that our family life was overshadowed by the risk of extreme poverty, uncontrolled inflation and premature illness.

We got used to living in a state of uncertainty, at the mercy of bank accounts that were on the brink of collapse, and with strict limits on what we could eat, experience, wish for. We never went hungry, though at times this was only thanks to help from neighbours, friends and relatives when my family’s income ran out and my father’s debts were at their peak. I do, however, remember growing accustomed to that ‘half-starvation you feel at the smell of dinner coming from the doors of the more well-to-do’, as the Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen described it in her memoirs. A persistent semi-starvation which we learnt to downplay, misleadingly labelling it as ‘cravings’. In my case, the sensation was further incited by the adverts for sweet yoghurts and cereals that flooded TVs in the 1980s and 1990s and which, to this day, provoke an uncomfortable temptation in me, emerging like a discordant echo of past desires.

A good proportion of the clothes my brother and I wore during the first twenty years of our lives had been bought second-hand, donated by an uncle or aunt or some family friends, or purchased at charity jumble sales. My mother, whose work as a seamstress helped with household expenses, always made a point of keeping them impeccably clean and repairing any blemishes. The newer ones were ‘church clothes’, the older ones for wearing on weekdays.

Our house was small and stuffy, built bit by bit at the rear of my grandparents’ house. The uncovered kitchen flooded at the first sign of heavy rain. This was the room where my brother and I studied after school and where my mother worked all day. The soundtrack to our lives was composed of the noise from her sewing machine and the songs on the radio, tuned in to some local station. Endless work, little money, and no time to undo what had been woven: there is no Ulysses, no Penelope in this story.

My mother hated him smoking inside the house. So, whenever he was in Jaú, my father spent a lot of time sitting on a step between the kitchen and the small yard connecting our home to my grandparents’ house. That step, the threshold between inside and out, made concrete the uncertain status that my father occupied for me, a man who was both an essential part of my life and a seasonal visitor who disrupted the rhythm of our days.

There were always bills to pay. A silent terror associated with the expression ‘overdraft’, which I must have learnt in my earliest years, always hung in the ether at home. And which clung, most of all, to the word ‘debt’: a suffocating word which spread through the rooms like cigarette smoke. That word arrived with the truck and stayed even after my father had left. To this day, hearing someone say ‘debt’ brings to mind the smell of cigarettes and the image of that step in my childhood home.

There is almost no written record of his fifty years on the road – just two postcards sent to my mother and some yellowing invoices in the drawer. But he remembers a lot, and his ‘madeleines’ emerge when you least expect it: an image on TV makes him remember when he went for several days without food, stuck on a muddy track in southern Pará; any news of a serious accident on the road opens up a whole trove of stories about the many he witnessed and the handful he was involved in; stories of remote villages, of poachers, of distant tropical landscapes, of companions – some loyal, others not, most of them dead. Narratives that march along and spring back to life without the help of photos or notes. The only thing anchoring them is the memory of a man who is nearly eighty, now somewhat garbled by time.

I’ve seen so many things, son. I should’ve written them down, taken photos. We didn’t have mobiles or anything like that back then. They didn’t exist. The only thing I could’ve taken them with would have been a Kodak, those black and white cameras, but your old man never had one. Because if I did have a record of all the things I’ve done you’d be so proud of your dad. It may seem like I don’t have much to show for it, but what is mine is everything I saw and recorded in my memory. So all I can do is try to remember and tell my story.

Photos showing my father on his travels during this five-decade period are also few and far between. Most of the ones that do exist record his presence on commemorative...