Feast Days

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

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.