In Ribeirão Preto, nothing came easily. Living in precarious conditions and unable to open his watch shop, the family decided to return to São João da Boa Vista. However, this new move also failed to bring the results they had hoped for.
With no alternatives, they returned once more to Ribeirão Preto. This time, luck began to change. Having finally resigned himself to not keeping a business of his own, Seu Jorge found work as a watchmaker and began working alongside a young goldsmith, João Rosseto, with whom he formed an immediate friendship.
It was João who suggested they open a watch shop together—an invitation that proved decisive, because for the first time in many years, the Assad family began to feel a small financial relief.
Family life also took on new contours: Cito, as a special-needs child, was no longer accepted in public schools, while Sérgio and Odair began school and enjoyed a more regular childhood. Despite the difficulties, they hardly suspected that, within that domestic environment, music would find fertile ground to germinate—expanding beyond the patriarch’s mandolin.
Little by little, the children began to surprise everyone. The first was the eldest, Cito. Given his condition, it would have been natural to assume he would struggle with fine motor coordination, rhythmic control, and the like. And yet he began tapping the rhythms of the songs his father played on any object in front of him. Attentive, Dona Ica asked her husband to buy a small tambourine for him to play with. What happened, however, was unexpected: Cito revealed extraordinary rhythmic ability and, more than that, over time developed—on his own— his own technique.
When Sérgio was twelve, Dona Ica received a visit from her brother, Uncle Nico. As was common in that house, there was always a guitar resting on the living-room sofa, and Nico, with the two chords he knew, invited his sister to sing. Watching the scene, Sérgio asked him to teach those chords—and that is how it all began. Dona Ica, for whom singing came naturally, lovingly began to sing every time her son chased her around the house with the guitar held out, as she went about her domestic chores.
One day, after a disagreement with his friend Waldemar—a guitarist who accompanied him in the choro circles—Seu Jorge came home, witnessed the scene, and asked the boy if he would like to learn to “play guitar for real.” Faced with the son’s enthusiasm, he took out his mandolin and began the very first lessons right then and there.
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Dona Ica, accompanied by Seu Jorge, Sérgio, and Cito. Music: "Marina," by Dorival Caymmi.
