Книга - Feast Days

Feast Days
Ian Mackenzie


A taut, powerful and profound novel about a young woman who follows her husband to Sao PauloSo. We were Americans abroad. We weren’t the doomed travellers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we weren’t the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didn’t have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I don’t think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.I was ancillary – a word that comes from the Latin for ‘having the status of a female slave’. That’s the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was ‘trailing spouse’ . . .























Copyright (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)


4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Ian MacKenzie 2018

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover photograph © plainpicture/Aurora Photos/Robert Benson

Ian MacKenzie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008298548

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008306540

Version: 2018-06-12




Praise (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)


‘This brilliant novel has no time for platitudes or conventional, ankle-deep morality; it plunges us straight to the depths. I’m not sure I know another book that feels at once so disaffected and so full of longing, so expansive in its sympathy and so terrifying in its candour. Devastating, funny and wise, it’s among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad’

GARTH GREENWELL

‘There is a sly, brooding intelligence at work in this novel, recalling for me the startling, highest times in American literature. MacKenzie is not just a great writer in the making – he’s already there’

BRAD WATSON

‘A beautiful, wry and honest exploration of belonging and not-belonging. The sharpness and precision with which the story is told reminded me in parts of Maggie Nelson … the prose is stunning’

SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

‘Brilliant. A pervasive sense of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, [is] conveyed in MacKenzie’s unruffled, discerning prose. MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction’

Publishers Weekly

‘Intelligent and atmospheric, Feast Days deftly limns the inner life of a foreigner whose own trajectory becomes increasingly bound up with the tensions and complexities of the society in which she has landed’

CHLOE ARIDJIS

‘Poignant and perceptive’

Booklist

‘The novel of the ugly American living abroad has bloomed into a genre all its own … Charles Portis’s Gringos, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper … Ian MacKenzie’s second novel arrives as a worthy addition to that list’

New York Times

‘A story about love and power, luxury and empire, set in one of the most socially stratified countries on the planet. MacKenzie’s slender novel feels heavier than many novels twice its weight’

San Francisco Chronicle




Dedication (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)


For Kelsey—

first reader of everything,

fixes the mistakes no one else has to see




Epigraph (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)


“Oh,” I said, putting my hat on. “Oh.”

—Mark Strand,

“I Will Love the Twenty-first Century”


Contents

Cover (#uf047fe9d-c82f-52f1-aace-8f30c301f673)

Title Page (#u1d1ed842-a071-5255-8555-e486c85464f0)

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Per Diem

False Cognates

Financial Considerations

Beautiful Works of Art Guarantee a 100% Experience

The Children’s Party

Incidentals

The Disaster of Heterosexuality

You Have to be Able to Explain What the Gini Coefficient Is

Do You Want Something?

In Defense of this Life

Proto-romance

Texts

Return

Sympathy for the Wife

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Ian MacKenzie

About the Publisher




PER DIEM (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)


My husband worked for a bank in São Paulo, a city that reminded you of what Americans used to think the future would look like—gleaming and decrepit at once. The protests began in late spring, although, this being the Southern Hemisphere, it was really the fall. I was a young wife.

So. We were Americans abroad. We weren’t the doomed travelers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we weren’t the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didn’t have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I don’t think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.

Our tribe was an anxious tribe. This was after Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after Occupy—people were starting to talk about the economic crisis in the past tense, boxing it up in the language of history. The Great Recession. The name was something we needed. I was amazed by how fragile wealthy men seemed in their own eyes. They could be thin-skinned also, mistrustful, myopic, boastful, cowardly, and frequently sanctimonious. Call it the anxiety of late capitalism. I should say that it was my husband who belonged to this tribe. I was ancillary—a word that comes from the Latin for “having the status of a female slave.” That’s the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was “trailing spouse.”

I wasn’t aware until after living there for some time that São Paulo lies almost exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn. The city was a liminal place, not quite tropical, not quite subtropical—really, it was both things at once. This fact, when I discovered it, possessed a kind of explanatory force.

One night we went to the Reserva Cultural to see the new Coen brothers film, about a folksinger in Greenwich Village in the 1960s who fails to become Bob Dylan, and afterward we walked up Avenida Paulista, past the radio antenna that from a distance resembled an ersatz Eiffel Tower, to a restaurant in Consolação. All the magazines liked it, a pretty restaurant on a bad corner. Nearby there were buildings covered with skins of stale graffiti, boarded-up windows, decaying brick, that sort of thing. I saw drug addicts in flagrante delicto. It wasn’t uncommon in São Paulo to find high-end dining in the midst of ruin. The whole thing could have been an art installation about gentrification: High-End Dining in the Midst of Ruin. On the sidewalk I saw the froth of old garbage, blown around by city wind.

Inside the restaurant you were assaulted by tastefulness. The click of ice in a steel shaker, a curl of white staircase. The walls were stacked cubes of smoked glass. My husband said the chef was famous.

“Apparently this used to be a dive bar,” he said. “Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque used to come here.”

“Those are co-workers of yours?”

“No, singers.”

“Oh,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re doing Facts About Brazil again.”

The men wore shirts with open collars. The women wore as little as possible. The bartender, a skinny black tie. The menu bragged of steak tartare, ceviche, gnocchi, gourmet minihamburgers. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a dive bar anymore.

We ate out in São Paulo. Restaurantgoing was the local cult, and we got involved. A home-cooked meal, as a solution to the problem of sustenance, would have set off alarms—who made this? That makes us sound terrible, perhaps, and unable to look after ourselves, but it isn’t an exaggeration.

This was around the time I stopped thinking of New York as back home. I told myself this meant I was officially an expatriate. My husband’s transfer to São Paulo had come about almost entirely because he already spoke some Portuguese—college girlfriend, five semesters. We’d been in São Paulo six months already, and we might stay on for years. The adventure was open-ended. Everything depended on my husband’s job; on variables outside my control, on events that hadn’t happened yet. One of the first words I learned in Portuguese was the term for the fine rain that fell constantly in that city, something between drizzle and mist. I was blonde, slim hips. I liked to wear green clothes. At night the city had an electric chartreuse glow. I saw more dark windows than lighted ones in the concrete faces of apartment towers. I saw Brazilian flags, soccer matches playing endlessly on flat-screen televisions, traffic signals changing at empty intersections.

“So, in this scenario.”

“In this scenario.”

“In this scenario we wouldn’t even be here.”

“Or there would be a nanny. A professional caregiver.”

“I meant we wouldn’t be here in Brazil.”

“People have children in Brazil,” he said.

“But it would be different.”

“It would be different.”

“Because there would be this small creature with us all the time.”

“You remain skeptical.”

I laughed. “In a word,” I said.

The waiter interrupted us to ask, in English, if we were enjoying the meal. When he went away I could see that my husband was annoyed. He felt it was an insult to his Portuguese, since he had used Portuguese earlier with the same waiter. I was sure the waiter only wanted to practice his English. It was perhaps fair to say that both men wanted to show off. “He was being polite,” I said. “I know,” my husband said.

São Paulo was a metropolitan area of twenty-one million people, and always in the throes of something. There were rumors of drought. There were gangland killings, labor strikes. Carjackings. Whole bus yards mysteriously went up in flames a couple of times a year—that was a thing. Criminals used dynamite to blast open A.T.M.s. Drinking water was delivered to our door in twenty-liter plastic jugs, and Brazil was making preparations to host the World Cup. The term of art was megaevent. “We’re not ready,” said the Brazilians I knew. I wondered if you could classify war as a megaevent. São Paulo was a megacity. Information began to accumulate. I was told things. I personally knew only rich Brazilians, because of my husband’s job. But all Brazilians took such delight, perplexing to an American, in criticizing their country; it was a style of critique that managed to deprecate nation and self at once. They would break into spontaneous arias of complaint. Everybody did this—taxi drivers, dentists. The reservoirs were low, politicians were corrupt, the economy was failing. The levels that should have been rising were falling and the levels that should have been falling were rising. Taxes—taxes were high. I read in the newspaper that the police murdered more people than the criminals did. Everything in that city was intimately juxtaposed—favela and high-rise, crack dealer and opera house.

I saw a favela on a souvenir coffee mug before seeing one in person, and recognized instantly that the mosaic of crowded bright rectangles signified the makeshift roofs and walls of poor people’s homes, such an image having become global visual shorthand for the shantytowns of the third world’s developing urban gargantuas. Tourists bought the coffee mugs because apparently there was something heartwarming about aestheticizing squalor. Poverty was colorful. The middle class was said to be “emerging”: a moving target. As soon as you get a bit of money, the things you once tolerated become intolerable.

When wealthy Brazilians left the country on vacation, they didn’t visit museums, or do anything cultural, as far as I could tell. They shopped. They shopped for clothes and perfume, for smartphones, for children’s toys.

In New York, I’d had a job in the public relations department of a multinational cement company. I wrote content for the company’s Facebook page and Twitter feed—a cement company with a Twitter feed. It paid as well as you would imagine. My husband used to suggest I do a master’s. He couldn’t say in what. I was twenty-five years old on the day of our wedding, an age when the future still seemed to shape itself willingly around whatever decisions I made. “With your degree,” said my unmarried friends—who were most of my friends—as if marriage somehow precluded the rest of life. But that degree wasn’t doing much for me. And I loved my husband. Something hadn’t jelled for me after college, professionally, and because I married early, because my husband made money, I was able to get away with it. “A woman without a job actually is like a fish without a bicycle,” as a friend of mine put it. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” I said. “Well, you have to imagine the fish looking really sad about not having the bicycle,” my friend said.

And so the prospect of living abroad initially had a primal, precognitive appeal—Brazil! I wrote the country’s name on A.T.M. receipts, cocktail napkins, Con Ed bills. We talked about what I could do there. It seemed like a chance to press the reset button. My husband, with the idea that I might write a blog, made the case that life in a foreign country automatically conferred interest. “You have the right sense of humor for that kind of thing,” he said. “And we could always have a kid,” he said.

We made love the night before leaving America and then lay in bed, at the hotel the bank was paying for, sharing a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and adding up all the relocation expenses the bank was also paying for. I wrote everything on the inside cover of the novel I was reading—Operation Shylock, in which Philip Roth discovers that someone named Philip Roth is causing increasing amounts of trouble in Israel—and then we both stared, mesmerized, now with more anxiety than excitement: it looked like a list of debts.

Once upon a time I had the idea of doing translation work, of making that my career, but “translation work” turns out to be a contradiction in terms, unless you know Chinese and want to translate technical manuals.

So we moved to Brazil. And that night, at the restaurant that used to be a dive bar, we ate too much; we drank too much. The chef was famous. The meal was expensive. My husband, reviewing the bill, said: “The bank’s paying for our flight home at Christmas.” It was a private joke now—any time we spent money, we recalled something the bank was paying for. If we dined out after my husband returned from a business trip elsewhere in Brazil, he would say: “Per diem.” As we left the restaurant and passed the maître d’, my husband said, “Valeu.” It was what people said after a meal. It meant: Worth it.

They came out of nowhere. They—three of them, boys. They hadn’t come out of nowhere, of course, but we didn’t see them until it was too late. “O.K.? O.K.?” the boy who was holding a knife in my face said.

The security people at the bank had given a briefing during our first week. The man who spoke was short, ridiculously muscled, ex-police. Something he said lodged in memory: You have to remember it’s a transaction; you want to end it as fast as possible. My husband and I joked that the briefing should have been called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Robbery Victims.”

Two boys worked on my husband—wallet, watch, phone. They searched his pockets by hand. Later, I thought of one’s helplessness during a medical examination. They told us what to do, how to behave, and we obeyed. The boy with the knife pulled the strap of my purse over my head. He had bloodshot eyes, wrists like old rope; he couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

“Aliança,” one of the other boys said. He meant my husband’s wedding band; I usually left mine at the apartment, on the advice of the ex-policeman. They were favela boys, dressed raggedly, seething with adrenaline and desperation. It was lucky for the boys that my husband spoke Portuguese—or lucky for my husband, or lucky for me. No foreigner without Portuguese would have known the meaning of “aliança.”

Luck—the part of life you don’t control. Or: you make your own luck. I can see both sides of that one.

The boy with the knife went through my husband’s wallet and took out the cash. He wasn’t satisfied. He threw the wallet to the pavement. “Tem mais,” he said. It meant: You have more.

He put his hand on my shoulder. I was now a prop in the argument he was having with my husband; he gestured with the knife between my husband and me, saying things I didn’t understand. While this was happening my mind was silent, empty. I didn’t scream. I nodded when words were spoken in my direction. When I thought of it later, my mind ran to the safety of cliché. I was petrified. My heart was in my throat. But it was already a cliché: poor, dark-skinned street kids robbing rich, white-skinned foreigners—it was a script other people had performed on countless nights before this. Two of the boys were suddenly moving away with my husband, taking him somewhere, leaving me and the one boy alone. “O.K.?” he said to me. “O.K.?” I was scared out of my mind.

You heard stories in São Paulo of robberies that went badly. People were killed. People who resisted what was happening, people who were too slow to hand over the car keys, people who failed to follow the script. That was the ex-policeman’s first piece of advice regarding the habits of highly effective robbery victims. Don’t resist.

The lights of a car blazed suddenly across the boys’ thin bodies. The sound of tires, other voices. It was enough to spook them. They ran. As he turned, the boy with the knife shoved me, and I fell to the ground. I closed my eyes and took a breath. I heard the sound of cheap plastic clapping on stone, going the other way, flip-flops.

My husband was there, lifting me, hugging my body to his. “I didn’t think,” he said.

I could see the light of the restaurant’s door, people going in and out, in sight of where we just were robbed. I was empty. I could have stood in the same spot forever, empty. Moments ago we had been paying a check.

“You were leaving,” I said.

“They were taking me to an A.T.M. They wanted me to take out more money,” he said.

“Then what would have happened?”

The next day we went to a police station. I knew at once there was no point. The city was too large, and there were too many boys, too much everything. My husband told the story, made a report. They asked him to provide a list of what was stolen. Wallet, brown, leather, brand unknown. Purse, black, leather, Dolce & Gabbana. Men’s watch, Burberry. Mobile phone, Samsung. Digital camera, Nikon. Cash, amount unknown. Wedding band, gold.

I wrote to Helen. Within hours, she wrote back:

That sounds god-awful. Of course I imagine they were black, and I imagine this somehow makes you feel worse about what happened. Don’t. Don’t think about it one more second.

Helen had also left New York during the previous year. She had a different set of reasons and went to Washington—a job, putting distance between herself and an ex-boyfriend, a general hunger that she had. Helen was my Republican friend. She said and thought things I would never say and rarely thought. She possessed a kind of Ayn Rand ruthlessness that troubled me but which I also admired. I replied:

Only one of the boys was black.

The cement vastness of São Paulo, seen from above, was otherworldly. Overgrown crops of high-rise condominiums extended endlessly under a pale yellow haze of polluted air, towers nuzzled together with tombstone snugness. Our neighborhood was south of Parque Ibirapuera, new money. The money aged as you went north; and then, farther north, the money disappeared. Poverty radiated outward to the edges of the city. At some point, driving around São Paulo, you crossed from the first world into the third world. Sometimes this happened in the space of a single block. Everywhere they were putting up more luxury high-rise condos, crushing to dust older buildings that had outlived their usefulness to the rich. I saw beggars and drug addicts going in and out of decaying structures in the last days before demolition. Creative destruction —that’s the polite way we have of putting it now.

The building we lived in was called Maison Monet. That delicate name belied the reality that it was a fortress. You passed through two locking gates at the entrance. There were cameras in the garage, in the elevators. At night, an armed guard, always well-dressed. The building had twenty-eight stories of floor-through apartments, a pool, a phalanx of doormen. The penthouse and its residents were a mystery; I never saw anyone push the button for the top floor. The features of the building were the product of fear, a set of fears that New Yorkers generally didn’t have anymore; New York had been tamed, but São Paulo was hairy with crime. We heard stories of apartment invasions, teams of men with guns. Men with guns swept through restaurants, hotels, they took everything. I thought about this every time I left the apartment, and the fact that I thought about it, that I was now a person who imagined the worst, bothered me more than the fear itself. The bank subsidized our apartment in São Paulo so that it cost no more than what our apartment in New York had cost, a difference of almost a thousand dollars a month. Here was one measure of my husband’s professional value.

I was able to track my husband’s phone over the Internet. There it was: a dot on the map, in a far northern zone of the city, impoverished and intimidating. I showed my husband. “Whoever that is, it’s not those kids,” he said. “And I already filed the insurance claim.” I zoomed in, and the digital map approached the limit of its resolution. The dot—an exact, real-time location, complete with geocoordinates—seemed like a promise, but I had the feeling that if I were to physically move toward it, it would simply move away from me.

We told our Brazilian friends about the robbery. Everyone cooed with sympathy and recognition: it was as if we had passed some test of admission. “They normally rob you with guns in São Paulo,” Marcos said. “Rio is knives,” Iara said. We laughed. They had stories of their own. Crime was a source of anxiety among the upper classes in São Paulo. Until you became so rich that you literally flew everywhere by helicopter.

At dinner, a conversation about money. Brazil’s economy, the mess it was in. Everything had gone so well for so long—and now the forecast was disaster. Our friends blamed the president, the party. Marcos worked with my husband and was married to Iara, and they knew João from somewhere. It was difficult to become friends with Brazilians—someone would suggest a time and not a place or a place and not a time—but after several months we were somehow still going to dinner with these people. They never laughed when they talked about politics.

Food appeared in portions so small they looked decorative, zoned on white plates, squares of black slate. Each plate-thing was accompanied by a lecture from the waiter: the per-dish speaking time was almost equal to the per-dish eating time. This was the tasting, the degustação. I didn’t make an effort to understand when the waiter talked; I wanted to know as little as possible about what I was putting in my mouth, to be totally unprepared. I wanted no context. In some cases, I couldn’t tell what the ingredients were, even after chewing and swallowing. Degust and disgust have the same root—gustare, to taste—but opposite meanings. Ignorance: that’s the word for what I wanted.

Dinner with Brazilians—the first courses arrived at the table after nine o’clock. We ate alien forms from the sea, Galician octopus, slate-pencil urchins, a funny-looking gratin of salt cod. This chef was famous, too, a woman. Late in the evening, she emerged from the kitchen, observed by the diners, admired, radiating gentle authority. She was young, roughly my age. People went to her, and she received her guests like an ambassador, calm and generous. We ate suckling pig. We ate pastes and jellies and cold soups made from native Brazilian fruits. I couldn’t disguise my dislike of certain things. My husband talked about every dish as if he were making notes for a review. Since moving to São Paulo, he had become one of those gastro-creeps. Food, as a subject for conversation, was for me on par with pornography. I wished that for him food were more like pornography: something to be enjoyed privately and not discussed as if it were art. I’m sure there is such a thing as better pornography and worse pornography, but you aren’t supposed to go on about it.

And we ordered the wine pairings, of course. My husband insisted on this, as if in life one thing were always destined to be paired with another. I had as little interest in talking about the wine as I had in talking about the food, but I enjoyed drinking it. The waiters were happy to top off the glass of whatever they had just poured and I had just finished, gratis. “I’m having the wine pairing with the wine pairing,” I said.

João was talking about soccer and asked my husband something about the rules of American football. My husband was in love with speaking Portuguese. I followed the conversation with more success than I participated in it, and I wondered if this made our Brazilian friends think of me as someone who was quiet, who let her husband do the talking. We draw our power from language. You aren’t yourself in a foreign tongue. I can see why some people find this liberating.

I preferred to learn Portuguese by reading the newspapers. In the written language I could decode a number of words from their similarity to French. Live conversation was altogether different; I often found myself plunging into a state of zombielike incomprehension. Learning a language is a nonlinear affair. A moment of triumph often follows a crisis of confidence. Or else, after days of utter mastery, as your brain processes the language without that laborious sensation of actually processing it, you might find yourself suddenly suffering from language panic, total verb collapse, making errors of conjugation like someone blindfolded striking at tennis balls. You reach for a preposition from the shelf in your mind and find nothing there, absolutely nothing, no language whatsoever.

There had been a news event that day. Members of a homeless-rights group were occupying an unused building owned by a telecom giant. In Portuguese, the occupation was called an “invasion.” Police blasted the occupiers out with water cannons; there were injuries. João was the one who mentioned it. He disapproved, but at first I misunderstood the source of his disapproval—the actions not of the police but of the homeless-rights group.

Marcos concurred: The government tolerates these people, he said. They let them do this business. Eventually they use the police, but for political reasons they don’t arrest anyone after it is over. It is illegal what these people do. It is a kind of theft to use a building that doesn’t belong to you. In the world, there is legal and illegal, there is not some third thing.

Iara spoke, his wife. “The only time a Brazilian will wait at a red light is when there is a camera,” she said. She spoke in English; she wanted me to appreciate her point. “In America, even in the middle of the night, you wait at the red lights. Marcos never waits at the red lights.”

Iara, I had loved her at once, she had a taste for irony. Her life had a vague glamour. She knew artists. She seemed to belong professionally to the gallery circuit of São Paulo without, as far as I could tell, actually making any money at it. That was the sort of thing that impressed me.

I heard tales of killings in our neighborhood. A kid who was closing up a café at the end of the night, shot by a robber. Three guys, connected guys, executed as they left a nondescript restaurant where they went for whiskey and cigars once a week; maybe a gambling debt. This happened just up the street. One of the doormen told me the next day as I was coming back to the apartment. The killers shot only the men they were trying to shoot, men they had reason to kill; they even warned off a waiter before opening fire. This information, when the doorman offered it, was intended to reassure me.

I spent a lot of time inside the apartment. I didn’t have much of a choice. Even if I’d spoken Portuguese well enough, and even if there had been something for me to do, professionally, I didn’t have the right kind of visa. I was a double major, cultural anthropology and dead languages. I was a net loss, in the idiom of my husband’s industry. Or maybe I was a write-off. Housewife—I couldn’t bring myself to use the word. Nor could my husband, I noticed. There really wasn’t anywhere pleasant to walk.

“If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him in the head.”

This was late, he couldn’t sleep.

“You’ve never fired a gun in your life. You make fun of gun nuts.”

“He was holding a knife in your face. I wish I’d had the power at that moment to kill him.”

“No, you don’t. Then you would have killed someone.”

“My wife’s face,” my husband said.

What I did was look into other people’s homes. I had a name for it: The Life of Observation.

The glassy apartment buildings started to resemble aquariums. My neighbors floated around inside their aquariums, lifting babies, carrying bowls, watching T.V. They all had giant flat-screen televisions. I knew because I could see them: I could watch what they were watching. For important soccer matches they put out flags. By neighbors I mean the people who lived in nearby buildings—about the people who lived in our building, above us and below us, I knew little, only what could be inferred from the bump of children overhead or a moment of close-quarters elevator interaction. The servant class—housekeepers, nannies, dog walkers, cooks—spent much more waking time in the apartments than their employers did. From our balcony, sixteen stories above the ground, we had some enviable sight lines. Unobstructed, cinematic views of distant street corners, newsstands and pharmacies, the roofs and exposed white bellies of other apartment buildings, swimming pools, bedroom windows a half mile away; it was a sniper’s heaven. I didn’t shoot anyone. Instead I sat on the sofa, in the middle of my glass-wrapped living room, like an object in a vitrine, reading. The blades of a helicopter occasionally chopped around the air outside. When I grew bored, I tried reading in a different room, and soon ran out of rooms.

The living room windows gave a view of the flight path into the domestic airport. If I stood at the window for several minutes, I would see a plane making its final descent. I remembered noticing the sound of the planes when we first moved in, but my awareness of it had faded over time. I sometimes caught the scent of jet fuel’s hard cologne in the air.

Once a week a woman named Fabiana came to the apartment and gave me a Portuguese lesson. Cognates interested me because they were easy; I even invented cognates: “temptação,” for instance, or “boastar.” It was like rolling dice: once in a while I got what I wanted. “Aspiração” means what you think it means; so does “decadência.” But Fabiana knew what I was up to. She would flash a tragic look that said: You must stop believing you can get away with this. Fabiana herself had good, sturdy English, dry and smooth, with an accent almost like a Frenchwoman’s; it was the kind of accent that was paid for. Even her errors were perfect. Is it redundant to say that I saw price tags everywhere? I couldn’t remember if this had started because of my husband, or earlier.

“I work in finance,” my husband would say whenever someone asked about his job. He never said, “I’m an investment banker,” let alone gave the name of his bank. He was like a doctor who says, “I work in medicine.” Like a lifeguard who says, “I work in beaches.” I came to believe he used this formulation because he liked the mystery of it; he capitalized on enigma. You either knew what he meant or you didn’t. Secrets are important to men. Every man tells himself he could have been a spy in another life.

I was a part of this world by virtue of being my husband’s wife. It shouldn’t have been so; I never had the disposition to make money. I didn’t study the right things, I didn’t earn it—although you weren’t really supposed to ask who earned what, who deserved. Now I was used to it, more or less, but at first the transition into my husband’s world seemed sudden. It was as if I had been sucked up a column of light into the belly of the mothership, abducted into wealth. I acquired new habits, expectations of the world. We took taxis at two a.m. instead of waiting in putrid, silent tunnels for the train. We ordered wine by the bottle instead of the glass. I stopped adding up the price of a meal as I ate and instead simply enjoyed it. That’s the thing about having money: there isn’t necessarily more happiness, but there’s so much more enjoyment. I honestly hadn’t known that.

My husband often worked late. It was both in his nature and in the nature of his work. I had never watched so much television in my life. Against my will, I learned the rules of soccer.

The tracking software was still able to locate my husband’s phone. This was four days after the robbery. The dot hadn’t moved an inch. It was in Zona Norte, a place I wouldn’t normally visit; a place others would discourage me from visiting. I looked up the street view of the address. It appeared to be a little bar, a boteco. I imagined a fat man running a side business out of the back, phones and watches that boys stole from people like me and my husband and then brought to him. I knew it was only a matter of time before the dot vanished.

The taxi driver was skeptical when I gave him the address but agreed to take me. Because of the distance from where I lived, he would earn a large fare.

Avenida 23 de Maio. High concrete walls sprayed with graffiti and coated in shadow; boys on motorcycles pulsing through veins of space between cars in otherwise congealed traffic. I saw a woman on the back of a moto, one arm around the driver’s stomach, purse clutched to her side. She was dressed for work.

I saw none of the condominiums I was used to, the towers. Instead there were little houses, aluminum fences, all of it cheaply and quickly made and now carelessly painted by sunlight.

The boteco was on a block with a few other shops, all of them closed, almost no signs of life. “Espera,” I told the driver. He nodded; waiting meant driving me home as well, doubling the fare. It was the early afternoon, and some men sat out front, drinking beer. They sensed my strangeness at once. It was my sex, my class, my foreignness. Everything was visible on the surface. I didn’t look at the men drinking but went to the counter, a man in a white apron.

My husband lost his phone, I said in halting Portuguese. And I believe the phone is here.

The man stared at me without answering. I am looking for the phone of my husband, I said.

There was a rack behind the counter where I could see cigarettes and packs of gum. He poked around, and came back with a new SIM card. He was offering to sell it to me; he thought this was what I wanted. No, I said. The phone of my husband. Do you have some phones? The phones of other people?

I knew the men outside, the men drinking, had stopped talking in order to watch what was happening, wondering what this strange foreign woman was looking for in a place like this.

Maybe you have the phone there, I said, pointing toward a door at the back. The man turned and looked at the door, and then he turned back to me and shook his head. I glanced outside. The taxi driver was smoking a cigarette and chatting with the men. He looked perfectly at ease with them. I knew they were asking about me, what on earth was I doing.

I was becoming increasingly distressed. One of the men outside came in; he wanted to check on me. Senhora, can I help? What do you need?

“Tudo bom?” the taxi driver said when I finally went back outside. “Voltar?” He was asking if I wanted to go home. I looked around at the men, the beers in their hands, all of them silent now, watching me with the stupid, unconcealed stare people use for celebrities. “Sim,” I said. I realized I was on the verge of tears.

Later, I thought of telling my husband what I had done, but, imagining what he would say, I decided against it.

I thought about the boys who robbed us. I had an idea of their lives. A culture of violence, alien and extreme; a world of dark streets, arbitrary punishment and deprivation, gangs, armed children, a kind of steady viscerality. No one offered them help. If they were killed, the police wouldn’t bother to find the killers. Everything around them advertised the low price of their lives. They were ragged, malnourished, they were not physically imposing young men. Even the weapon they used to rob us was cheap and makeshift—there was tape on the handle of the knife. Society didn’t protect them, and so they had no incentive to obey the boundaries society created to protect others. For them, abandonment and freedom were inseparable; by freedom, I mean the freedom they felt to violate the rules others followed. The consequences of being caught robbing us were not significantly worse than the consequences of not robbing us. If they had begged peacefully, if they had asked for charity, we wouldn’t have given them anything.

Unemployment, if nothing else, gives you time to think.

For instance, it is insane to walk down a city street in America and expect the homeless men there not to attack you and rob you.

I wondered if that boy had ever used his knife on a woman whose purse he wanted. It was an enormous blade, more enormous now in memory. The fact that he had taped up the handle only made the threat seem more authentic. I felt a horizon of rage expand within me, long and bright, something like what I imagined my husband was feeling when he spoke of killing the boy who had the knife. The rage was simple, satisfying, and I savored the sensation as it melted out of me like ice.

I couldn’t think of the boys as thieves. Jean Genet was a thief.

Thief —from Old Saxon and Middle Dutch, and a whole gene pool of other dead tongues. I find it difficult to come across a word and not think about its origins. This ends up being debilitating, as you might imagine.




FALSE COGNATES (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)


I was out wandering in the neighborhood, waiting for my husband to come home from work, when I was caught in a sudden rain. It was evening. I went into the nearest store, a bookshop; the shelves of blond wood and ordered rows of spines seemed to collect and cast back the warmth of the shop’s lamps. I walked through, in no hurry. There was a café, the fragrance of espresso. I felt better. I was in fiction, then nonfiction, then something else. There was a case of English-language books, out of order and seemingly chosen at random. I liked the inconsiderate chaos of it. I used to be depressed by the thought that you would never read every book that was worth reading—you wouldn’t be able to read even a significant percentage, and much of what you did read would turn out to be dull or unoriginal or simply forgettable. In this light, any bookshop came to seem almost pointless in its abundance; its infinity of print mocked a lifetime’s finiteness. My friend Helen, when I told her this, said she didn’t understand me at all; and later I came to think she was right, that I was worrying about the wrong things. I found a shelf of novels by Clarice Lispector. I’d read something of hers once, in an English translation; harrowing. She was a diplomat’s wife. She and her husband had lived in Naples, Washington, Switzerland. In letters she complained of the cocktail parties. I pulled down one of her books and flipped at random to an interior page. “É como se eu tivesse uma moeda e não soubesse em que país ela vale.” Money is confusing, in other words. Then I went back to the beginning and in my mind’s English read the first sentences: “– – – – – – am searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand.”

I knew other Americans in São Paulo. My husband had some American co-workers, and he knew Americans working at the other banks. Americans sometimes turned up. I overheard English at the cafés on Rua Oscar Freire.

There was a little collective, which privately I referred to as the Wives. We formed a circle because of the language we spoke, the roles we inhabited. We gathered together over time as if by some natural process; every other week I met someone new, and someone else stopped coming. I was once the new person. There were lunches, afternoon drinks; we ordered bottles, sauvignon blanc. I knew diplomats’ wives, the wives of company lawyers. The Mormon wives didn’t drink, but they laughed and gossiped as much as the drinking wives. The women who had children had nannies as well.

I met the Wives at a restaurant that was all windows, no walls; it was a shrine of glass and status anxiety. The point of all that glass was to look. The lunchgoers looked at one another, the passersby on the street looked in at the lunchgoers, and the lunchgoers occasionally looked out to see who was looking in. All that looking was highly contagious. You looked at strangers with more interest than you looked at your companions. It was a palace, a temple of looking.

The Wives had lived in London, Miami, Budapest, Nairobi, Hyderabad, Kuala Lumpur, they had lived all over, moving always because of their husbands’ jobs. They spoke about the boredom of interesting places. We were all of us ancillary. Expatriates had a way of talking selectively about the past. It was a perk of the lifestyle; no one asked for the full story. They talked about the way things were done in other countries, how the roads were, the horror of traffic, what you could buy in the grocery stores.

Karen said that when she learned she and her husband were moving to Brazil, she cried for three days. “But now I love it here. My husband found this bar in Pinheiros, we go and listen to music. You would love it. Brazilian music.” Rachel said, “My greatest fear isn’t growing old. It’s going blind. They’ve done the laser eye surgery twice already, and it keeps wearing off.” Whitney said, “Every time I come here, the prices have gone up.” Alexis mentioned Stanford, a degree in history. “So you and I are roughly equals in unemployability,” she said, addressing me. Vanessa said, “My mother had a great-uncle who lived in Brazil for years, up in the central savanna. He was a rancher, raising cattle. I can’t even imagine.” Lucy said, “There were no wild years for me.” Karen said, “God, I hate São Paulo sometimes.” Whitney said, “Do yours talk about old girlfriends in a way that tells you they still keep in touch?”

Stephanie had lived for a time in Addis Ababa. She talked about the absence of modern technology; her style of complaining was to make a show of not complaining. “I almost never read e-mail, there was no Wi-Fi anywhere. Life without all that was such a revelation,” she said. “I did all this thinking that’s impossible to do anywhere else. Ethiopia is such a spiritual place.”

I went out of the restaurant into bright, post-wine afternoon light. I walked with Alexis and Rachel toward Avenida Paulista. Something was happening there. Traffic was stopped. It was a demonstration of some kind, maybe a few hundred people. Some carried signs. It wasn’t immediately clear what was at stake. I heard chanting, whistles. Rachel asked what it was. “Oh,” Alexis said, “labor grievances or something. They’re like the French here. They’re always on strike.”

Marcos, my husband’s co-worker, had the idea that I should give English lessons, and offered himself up as my first client. I didn’t hear this directly from him; my husband acted as intermediary. “Marcos already speaks English,” I said. My husband responded by pointing out that I would have to be paid in cash. It happened suddenly: I was a tutor of English. A tutor, not a teacher—teachers have relevant degrees.

I streamed some videos whose intended audience was people learning English as a foreign language. I thought that if I saw things from the student’s perspective I would make a better tutor. This led me to a video in which a Finnish teenager “speaks” different languages—that is, she babbles nonsensically while replicating the music and cadence of more than a dozen tongues. She conveys amusement, boredom, anger, sarcasm, and exhaustion without ever using actual words, always convincingly, even in “English.” This all looked like a lot more fun than actually learning a new language.

My single qualification as a tutor was the ability to speak a language whose deep grammar I had acquired before I could independently use the toilet. But apparently Brazilians did this, they hired stray Americans as language tutors; the market proved that people would pay money for instruction from someone with no training. I assumed I was less expensive than someone with training. Michelle, one of the Wives, said she knew several American women who had picked up tutoring work this way. So it seemed these Brazilians never stopped to wonder if they could turn around and teach a foreigner Portuguese.

At our first lesson Marcos told me he was looking for “refinements.” He spoke as if I were a shopkeeper and refinements were a kind of tiny, hard-to-find screw he needed to fix his watch. The fact that he knew the word refinements suggested there was little I could do for him. I asked what the Portuguese was for refinements, and the word he used translated more literally to “perfectings.” Already, the lesson was facing the wrong way.

Late at night, prostitutes waited for men in cars to stop and roll down their windows. This would happen a few blocks from our apartment. The prostitutes were tall, with tight skirts, strong shoulders, long, smooth hair. They used to be men. One lived in her car; I often saw her in the daytime on the sidewalks, shouting at people. Once, as I walked past, she spoke to me. I’m sick, she said.

My husband sat in an armchair, reading. I was in theory reading as well, but I couldn’t concentrate, and kept looking at him. Of course, I’d spent much of the day reading already. My husband’s face made an expression of trying to shut out the world in order to focus on the words in front of him. I turned to a new page in my book, and he swiped to a new page in his. He sat with good posture. He had good genes. He exercised. I asked him to read aloud something from his book. “ ‘When the British tried to levy a hut tax—a tax of five shillings to be raised from every house—in January 1898, the chiefs rose up in a civil war that became known as the Hut Tax Rebellion,’ ” he said. It was a work of economic history that purported to explain the inequality among nations. I said: “Is it considered a civil war if they were rebelling against their colonizers?”

I performed virtually all the housework—it almost goes without saying. My husband didn’t ask it of me, and he made a nominal effort, but he was at work all day and I was at home all day, so. I had no instinct for it, no homemaker gene, which, whether you want to admit it or not, some women do in fact possess. Some women do not feel especially put upon to find themselves washing a husband’s underwear; I felt put upon. But I also felt the anxiety of the non-earner, of household dead weight, and so I washed my husband’s underwear without mentioning to him, or to anyone, how strange it made me feel. Perhaps this was the start of resentment; but to resent my husband, I would have had to believe he’d stolen me away from a career, a path I wanted, and of course that wasn’t the case at all. If it weren’t for my husband, I would have been in New York authoring a fresh tweet about an exciting new blended cement—blending your cement guards against bleeding and inhibits sulfate attack—made from supplementary cementitious materials such as fly ash, hydrated lime, and furnace slag.

In New York, I was spared, because of my husband and his job. I was spared a certain kind of apartment in a certain kind of marginal neighborhood, roommates scavenged from the Internet, furniture scavenged from the street—a shipwreck life. I knew those things, I had done those things; but not for as long as I should have. Splitting a two-bedroom apartment four ways, foldouts in the living room, and always avoiding the landlord. I knew people who lived like that. The people who lived like that told me about it over coffee, over drinks, my treat. I had friends who spent their waking hours in cafés, working on their novels, screenplays, art concepts, graphic designs. They inhabited colonies of people like themselves, all hunched forward slightly in front of laptop screens, seated in rows behind their shields of glowing apples. They gentrified. I should have been made to suffer more. I should have had to live with the moral knot of gentrification, of being one of the gentrifiers. Instead I had a view of the Hudson from an apartment in Tribeca that a real-estate agent had found. I should have been deprived, because of who I was and what I wanted, what I did not want, what I enjoyed; because of what I could and could not do. Could: write a coherent sentence, handle a first-declension Latin noun (e.g., latebricola, latebricolae —“one who lives in hiding”). Could not: conduct a regression analysis, code in Java or Python, handle tools, afford health insurance.

Marcos’s wife, Iara, made an effort to look after me. She once spent five months in San Diego studying English and had nothing but good things to say about America. She was a housewife, a mother, but the childcare they paid for seemed to take the sting out of motherhood; she was free during the days. One afternoon she took me to an exhibition of photographs at a gallery in Vila Madalena. The photographer was French. His subject was crowds—faces, bodies, community, anger. They were photographs of demonstrations and had simple titles: Beirut, Islamabad, Istanbul, Gaza, Sanaa. There were no dates. The titles of two photographs could have been switched without anyone knowing. It was impossible to distinguish the wailing women and rock-throwing men of one place from those of another.

The photographer’s trademark was close-up shots of groups. In his pictures you saw only faces, no surroundings. People filled the frame like paving stones. And they were gorgeous images. The photographer aestheticized rage and suffering. I supposed they didn’t resent the photographer’s presence: wailing and rock-throwing are acts of performance; demonstrators want to be photographed. The pictures felt familiar, the way every morning the newspaper feels familiar. You came away with the sense that political despair was a universal and permanent condition.

“This one looks a bit like you,” Iara said. Her finger hovered over the face of a woman near the front of a crowd. She had dark hair and skin, brown eyes, and was perhaps my age but in almost every other way was different from me. “I know she doesn’t look exactly like you,” Iara said, anticipating my objection, “but the shape of her face, the way her chin is like this, it reminds me of you. She is like the Palestinian protestor version of you.”

John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, always reminded me of my mother—of my mother not as I knew her from memory, but as I knew her from pictures taken in her youth. It hadn’t occurred to me previously that if Madame X (who in truth was a socialite named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, and whom Sargent painted when she was twenty-five years old, about the age I would have been when I first saw her portrait) resembled a previous edition of my mother, then she must, in some way, resemble me. I don’t believe in past lives. But for a long time I used to have the feeling that someone, somewhere, had already done whatever I was going to do.

Iara was looking at a photograph of a suffering child. “Just because it makes you feel something doesn’t mean it is art,” she said.

In our building there lived a boy of no more than nine or ten who wore the uniform of what I knew to be an excellent and expensive private school. He spoke eerily fluent English. He was like a little American boy. He asked questions when I saw him in the elevator. Sometimes I felt as if I were being interviewed. He had the glossy brown hair of a boy in a T.V. ad, the kind of large brown eyes that seduce parents into recklessness.

Marcos had recommended me highly, the man said. I had the impression that Marcos had said something else to him, that I was a kind of charity. “The American wife has time on her hands,” etc. The man’s office had quite a view: a deep, cinematic plunge into the heart of the city. Helicopters sailed along the axes of the skyline, floating at the limit of my eyesight, like ships on a horizon. A good number of high-rise apartment buildings in this part of the city had mansard roofs or other architectural elements from the past—the idea being to make those buildings look older than they really were.

Some people had a sincere desire to improve their English for professional reasons, or they had an intellectual love of language; for others, I came to understand, keeping an English teacher on the payroll was proof of status. And I came to see that my skills as a tutor weren’t the thing that mattered, only whether or not I was liked.

Obediently I began to think of these people as my clients. The client I liked best was an obstetrician who worked at the city’s most exclusive hospital. Her name was Claudia. Claudia was in her forties, and she had a directness of manner and speech that impressed me, a sense of her bearings; the way she carried herself made me think male colleagues would know better than to mishandle her. At the hospital she attended several foreign women per month and wanted to communicate more easily with them. The husbands are always more nervous than the wives, she said.

“And I always know when one of them, one of the husbands, is not faithful,” she said. I gave lessons at her apartment in the evening or, occasionally, the early morning. When we met in the morning her family would smash around through breakfast in the next room. They were people I heard and never saw. “He will give a lot of time talking to the male doctors and talk with me not so much. Only the husbands who are guilty cannot talk to an attractive woman,” Claudia said.

“He will spend a lot of time,” I said.

To prepare for our lessons, I taught myself medical vocabulary. The terms were unfamiliar to me even in English—vernix, lochia, oedema, words that weren’t English, really, but specimens cut from the cadavers of Greek and Latin and then preserved in the formaldehyde of a medical dictionary.

I worked for Claudia; I was her employee. She had other employees. This was a category of people in her life, the category I belonged to. I saw the housekeeper when I came to the apartment. Days for Claudia’s housekeeper began very early and ended very late. She arrived in darkness and left in darkness. I was paid more by the hour but was involved much less intimately in Claudia’s life than the housekeeper, a woman who bought groceries and changed the linens and walked the two dogs and polished the frames of the family photographs; and yet I was the one who came by way of the social elevator, like a guest. Claudia never required me to use the service elevator—which the housekeeper surely never had to be told that she was expected to use. The difference, I supposed, was that I also lived in an apartment like Claudia’s. She was indeed an attractive woman.

Marcos paid me in envelopes. Claudia folded bills around her thumb and then handed them to me. In one case the money was invisible, in the other it was unregarded.

It was work whose purpose was to relieve boredom rather than to earn a living—which made it not work at all, but a pastime.

Sometimes my husband met me after work for a drink at a boteco near Maison Monet. It was on the corner, by a frozen river of traffic, the chairs arranged carelessly on the sidewalk. The neighborhood men clustered there in the evenings, eating pastéis and bolinhos, while the owner himself brought out more bottles of Antarctica beer. Some nights musicians would set up inside and play songs of old Brazil. The men at the tables talked and talked. It was a country of never-ending social obligation, social approach. We knew the owner—the bar had been his father’s, it had been in business fifty years. Passengers in cars stuck in traffic would roll down the windows and chat with the men at the tables, and one of the men would hand over a glass, a sip of cold beer before the light changed, a fleeting scene under the city glow of dusk. Evenings: the ashtrays quickly filled up, and the owner came around to replace them.

“Although usually you come home much later than this.”

“I wouldn’t say usually.”

“You’re frequently absent.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.”

“Let me say it differently, then. This is nice, being here with you like this. I wish it happened more often.”

“The reason I stay late isn’t that I don’t want to be here.”

“But you like what the late hours signify. You’re central to the enterprise. Without you, the ship would sail off course.”

“I want to be good at my job, yes.”

“My point is that you already miss things.”

“I wouldn’t miss anything important. Not something truly important.”

Brazilians loved to tell you about New York City. They had been there, they hadn’t been there, and in any case they had glowing reviews. Here I am referring to rich Brazilians. Everything is so organized, they said. Everything works so well there, they said. They would all live there if they could.

After a lesson at his office, Marcos gave me a ride. It wasn’t the direction he would go normally, but he had a dinner in Brooklin; my husband was at a dinner as well, somewhere else. “Blindado,” I said, touching the leather detailing on the inside of the door. Bulletproof. I’d learned the word from the signs hanging at every car dealership—bulletproofing your vehicle was the standard practice. But Marcos corrected me: his car was unproofed. “If you have it, they notice you. It is not a good idea unless you are already a target. I don’t want to be asking for attention. People here have cars that are much more …” He didn’t have the word he wanted in English. I supplied it: “Flashy.” “Flashy,” he said, taking possession of the term. “Yes. This is what I want to avoid.”

I learned that the name of my neighborhood came from the Tupi-Guarani word for lie. Apparently, there was an epic poem written in the late eighteenth century—which, I was assured, all Brazilians once knew by heart—in which the word was used as the name of a female character. She was symbolic, the incarnation of false love.

My husband invited me to join him at an airline-industry trade fair. It was part of an annual convention. I’d never been to a convention of any kind and was curious. For centuries conventional pertained simply to any agreement between parties, to coming together, and only in later usage did it swerve into synonymy with unoriginal, and then boring. He said there would be cocktails.

The booths were like little stages: elevated, illuminated, gleaming with expensive chrome surfaces. Those booths cost money—you have to buy to sell. There were booths for tarmac guys, engine-part guys, emergency lighting system guys. I admired a booth that belonged to a designer of cabin interiors. A quartet of airplane seats was on display to show off the company’s work. The lighting was soft and invitational. Everything about it was the opposite of actually being on an airplane. Passing conventiongoers stopped to regard the seats as if they were art.

He hadn’t lied about the cocktails. At many of the booths, women dressed like private escorts mixed caipirinhas and chatted with the men who approached. Men wandered the convention floor solo, with the verve of partygoers. The women moved in groups and seemed less sure of themselves.

From the far end of the hall, I heard shouting—a sound growing, something happening, but I couldn’t see what it was. My husband was elsewhere. I went in the direction of the noise and arrived in time to see a group of men in matching blue jackets celebrating. They gave the impression of a tribe. People nearby smiled, the way spectators smile at a winner in a casino. I had no idea. I was the anthropologist, missing information. There were drinks at a nearby booth, and I went there. A girl gave me a caipirinha and a man who was standing nearby spoke to me in Portuguese. I smiled, out of instinct, which must have encouraged him; he kept going even as I failed to understand almost anything he said. His face was tanned, shining. I detected a kind of spoiled masculinity in him, a negative current in whatever he was saying. He talked ceaselessly, as if he would lose me the second he paused for breath. I knew that at any moment he would begin to touch me. I moved away. He never stopped talking, and I never stopped smiling.

“Why are we here? Why are you here?”

“You know. Meeting people.”

“To what end?”

“You never know who you’re going to meet.”

“Networking.”

“Networking.”

“You’re fishing for clients. Investment opportunities.”

“I’m interested in certain indicators about the future of Brazilian aviation that will drive specific portfolio decisions.”

“So you’re spying.”

“Spying is a pretty melodramatic word for what I’m doing. I’m listening. I’m collecting information. I’m not being secretive about it—I’m giving out business cards. I’m here to read signs. I get paid to predict the future. You’re making fun of me.”

“There’s a sign,” I said.

The sign said: COMO MONETIZAR SUAS RELAÇÕES. I wanted to ask them about it—I would have liked to know how to monetize my relationships. At the booth were two women, wearing absurd dresses and holding pamphlets. I owned shirts that were longer than the dresses those women wore. They looked like women who knew how to monetize relationships.

I said this to my husband and he laughed. He also did an admirable job of restraining himself from staring at the women’s legs.

Respectable Brazilian newspapers published reports on actresses who had recently disrobed on camera. The actresses gave interviews about it, about what it was like to be naked, about the regimes of fitness and diet they used to prepare. The newspapers faithfully debunked rumors of body doubles, because it would have been tragic to learn that the actress who was naked on screen wasn’t the same actress who was giving an interview about it.

De: a privative. Some knowledge is more monetizable than other knowledge.

Brazilians bought more plastic surgery than anyone else in the world. There was an epidemic of fake tits, and among men the vogue was calf implants, apparently. Women danced in the Carnaval parades naked, or as good as naked—they wanted their pictures in the newspapers. This was considered completely normal behavior. In my life, I had seen so many pairs of other women’s breasts on television and in movies; a naked pair of breasts was now as common a sight as an old man waiting at a bus stop. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass provided the template for society—men wearing suits, women wearing nothing. There was now the presumption of female nudity. You could tell a man was disappointed when a television show didn’t have some breasts, as if this were a breach of contract.

At Claudia’s: “I have to go mother. Mother —I may use it as a verb also, yes?”

Her daughter had forgotten something. Claudia needed to go out and rescue her child from the absence of whatever it was she forgot. I was instructed to wait for her return. I was thirsty, and felt that Claudia would want me to help myself to a glass of water. I drank the water. Then I walked down the hallway. It did not seem like something I would ordinarily do, prowling. I heard noise coming from one of the rooms.

It was Claudia’s teenage son, sitting in front of a computer screen. I saw the jagged fumbling of video footage, heard a subverbal human sound, before he realized I was behind him and closed the browser’s window. I assumed he’d been watching pornography. He didn’t seem embarrassed. He said nothing and after a moment opened the browser again. “You can watch if you want,” he said.

A crowd surged, seethed. I saw the anger in people’s faces. They carried signs, the writing in Arabic. The presence of police in military gear and the low quality of the video generated the expectation of violence. “You want to find the cell phone videos to know what it was really like,” Claudia’s son said. He spoke good English, better than his mother’s. I went toward him, the screen.

I asked if what we were seeing was Egypt. “No,” he said, “Tunisia. Egypt is next.”

We watched videos. They had no beginnings and no ends, broken shards of protest activity. Everything happened in medias res. In one video, somebody collided with the man holding the camera—the cell phone—and it fell, and for the next ten seconds we watched the shuffling of feet, oddly peaceful, like a herd of cattle in a pen. The video suggested a way of contemplating an event: to shear it totally of context; to divorce it from narrative; to isolate it like bacteria on a slide. There was only this moment of failing, swimming focus, both calm and delirious, somehow authoritative. The caption gave the place and date, nothing else: “Cairo, 28 January.” The person who made the video and uploaded it to the Internet had fished out a single moment from the stream of time, a moment that now had no way back to the stream from which it came.

Claudia’s son’s name was Luciano. He had attended an expensive private school, a school with a reputation, and now he was supposed to be studying for the university entrance exams. He was enrolled in a preparatory class, the cursinho. The exams meant everything in Brazil among a certain caste; he had failed once already. I knew, from what Claudia told me during our lessons, that Luciano’s interests in life were inchoate. She spoke as a mother, concerned. Claudia said she did not know his friends, and only a couple of years ago he didn’t behave like this. Something had changed for him. He was seventeen. I asked what signs she was seeing, what troubled her. “The books he is reading are not the books he has to read for his exams,” Claudia said.

The boy I found wasn’t reading books at all; he was watching videos of revolutions on the other side of the world. Luciano’s hair was long, falling in rich black curls, he had dark hands. “So this is what interests you,” I said. He didn’t respond. I left him with his videos, the multiple chat windows he had open; he typed without looking at his fingers. I wasn’t alarmed. I had the sense that he was a boy, doing boy things, poking around in weird holes. Claudia was a mother. Mothers worry. An interest in videos of the Arab Spring made sense to me—a seventeen-year-old wants to see evidence of people in the world whose actions have consequences beyond a score on an exam, a status update, whose lives are not bound by the same set of rules. The bedroom smelled humidly of boy, boyhood, a sweetish smell of skin on which sweat had formed and dried and formed again, as though he hadn’t gone out in days.

Notwithstanding my new job as an English tutor, I continued my own study of Portuguese. During our lessons Fabiana would deplore the state of Brazilian politics. It was clear to me that her disdain for the ruling party was the result of love that had soured. She was a passionate woman. She had fierce attachments to individual politicians. She wanted to love them, and when love failed, she had nowhere to turn but hate. Politics mixed with the finer points of language. She could veer from the Workers’ Party to the problem of false cognates in a single sentence. “Fui decepcionada,” she would say, meaning not that she had been deceived, but that she had been disappointed, as only a lover can be. She was fond of the language teacher’s old warning about “false friends,” an injunction I remembered from as far back as sixth-grade French. I faithfully corrected my own clients when they said they were pretending to buy birthday gifts for their wives.

“Anyway.”

“Anyway, what I’m hearing—you wouldn’t believe it. The money. Where it comes from, where it’s going. And everyone knows. It’s a way of life here. After a while you assume the worst.”

“Your bank is part of this?”

“No, I’m talking about the internal practices of other companies, their relationships with government. Governments, plural. What we do is watch what happens. Understand the lay of the land. It’s routine surveillance.”

“So you aren’t personally implicated.”

“Don’t talk about this when Marcos is around, by the way,” he said.

“Not that any of this would be news to him.”

Iara arrived at the restaurant with tears in her eyes. I thought perhaps she had been arguing with Marcos and was trying to wipe away the evidence. But this wasn’t the case; Marcos had water in his eyes as well. They said there was a protest. They said the police had used tear gas while they were trying to cross the avenue where the protestors were marching. They said they saw a police officer swing at a young man with his truncheon. The restaurant served Lebanese food. The air was warm, an aroma of coriander and mint. The table linens were paisley. They went to the bathroom to wash the gas out of their eyes.

“What were they protesting?”

“An increase in the bus fare.”

“Was it a large increase?”

“Twenty centavos.”

“They were protesting twenty centavos?”

The avenue where the protestors were marching was named in memory of a revolt in São Paulo in 1932, against President Getúlio Vargas, who ruled without a constitution. The revolt came after popular demonstrations across the state and the killing of four student protestors; there was another avenue named in memory of the four students. A couple of decades later, Vargas, then serving a different term of office and facing a different political crisis, committed suicide in the palace bedroom in Rio de Janeiro, in his pajamas, on the day of Saint Bartholomew’s feast.

I felt pain. I tried to ignore it for a day, and then another, without admitting to myself that I knew what it was. Then it became too much, and I took a taxi to the hospital.

I had never been inside a hospital that didn’t feel like a precinct of illness, that made you forget what it was there for, but this one almost succeeded. It had many floors and many wings, like an ocean liner. It offered valet parking. At last I found the elevators—eight elevators arranged in a ring, like men standing in judgment. I was bewildered to discover they had no call buttons. A docent, seeing my confusion, ushered me to a central console, where after some discussion he entered the number of the floor I wanted; the console’s screen then told us which of the elevators would take me there; and then the button-pushing was over, as I needed only to stand in the elevator while it went automatically to my floor. It was a specific kind of inconvenient convenience: a system that seemed futuristic because, in addition to requiring a more complex internal computer, it redistributed the normal labor of elevator use—pushing buttons, choosing floors—in a novel way without eliminating any of it. The docent who loitered near the elevators was necessary to translate all that modern efficiency to the laity. It was as if the advancing edge of technology had returned us to a time when a little man sat in the elevator box and worked the controls for you. For some reason the hospital was named after Albert Einstein.





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