Macaws flying among elephant tree trunks

One needs the enstrangement
of a different place,
sometimes,
to write about what the eyes
don't see anymore.

A real writer's cliche, but it's true.

I compare my two tropics:
after Brazil,
Venezuela.

Drier, so much drier,
medium-green foliage,
none of the dripping moisture
of the figueira
of the mangueira.
Palm trees,
with elephant trunks painted white,
banana trees,
cacti,
yucca plants. 

Spanish-style houses,
austere,
two-storied,
with red-tiled roofs and white-washed walls,
with black or white fences,
always.

The sudden flourish:
flowers- coral red, or bright lemon yellow. 

But always the sister villas,
the iron railings,
white Granada,
white Andalucia,
recalled?
Traces of administrative Spain
of the well-regulated,
bureaucratic maze
after the conquest?

Brazil, a Baroque chaos, a post-modern pastiche.

In Caracas, it seems,
the 50s and 60s never happened.
No beveled houses,
with absurd little bridges,
or buildings
with Niemeyer curves,
or v-shaped pillars,
like a woman's half-open legs. 
Sao Paulo is so far away.

The light here is brighter,
stronger,
whiter.
More wind too.
The tops of the palm trees have been chopped off.
Macaws red and blue fly
strangely
absurdly
bizarrely
screeching.

There are more holes in the streets:
Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela.

In Sao Paulo,
Itaim,
new places pop up
like wild flowers
or weed,
Rascal,
Vanilla cafe,
Sao Pedro pub,
yet another temaki place.

But the kids, at the club,
here, there,
the teenagers look the same:
Abercrombie t-shirts,
and Aeropostale.
The boys wear pastel-colored bermudas,
checked,
hanging low around their hips,
white or navy or pink polo shirts,
and white sneakers.
The OC look.
The girls, just as clean,
ironed shorts that hug their honed curves,
pale t-shirts,
Converse.
They are clean, clean, clean.
Oh and isn't their English speckless!

In Sao Paulo and in Caracas,
the kids like Obama.

The ship´s blind progress

Voyage-inthedark is an apt name for this blog. It carries just the right degree of ambiguity. Before even reading my stuff, most people would probably expect me to be embarking upon a rather somber path, associating darkness with sadness, melancholy, anger, and all those other emotions. But everything is a matter of perspective, of course.

For a long-haired teenage boy who constantly stumbles upon the incapacity of transmitting his (rather vague) feelings inside, darkness might mean: everything that is expressed in one of the sadder Metallica songs.

Well, when I think of a teenager and then Metallica, I am giving away my age: I am recalling the dozens of headbanger boys that populated my own adolescence, those that wore Pantera and Skid Row and Iron Maiden black T-shirts, and gathered gleefully in circles around a boom box at parties, dropping their heads down at a 45-degree angle. They would jerk their heads up and down, their clean or dirty, straight or curly mane bobbing along to the rhythm of the super-sped up guitar. They may have been sad, or not. Or perhaps, and more likely, they were full of anger. No matter. Darkness was definitely part of their language, their world-view. Darkness was a recurring motif in all those heavy-metal or trash-metal songs. Think of Fade to Black:

Life it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters no one else

It´s a song about suicide, or so it seems. It's a song about losing oneself. It´s a song about feeling nothingness. It uses well-known metaphors to indicate despair, existential angst if you will. And always, darkness is the ultimate signifier.

Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony
Growing darkness taking dawn

Of course, there were other images: that of being frozen, for instance. There was a song called Trapped under ice.

I don't know how to live trough this hell
Woken up, I'm still locked in this shell
Frozen soul, frozen down to the core
Break the ice, I can't take anymore

Here, it was all about this feeling of imprisonment, of impotence, of immobility. I don't even know if there was a story behind the song. I suspect it was a story about waking up from a coma, or perhaps there was a hint of science-fiction to it "No release from my cryonic state". Had the guy been literally frozen? Who knows...
I never listened that carefully to Metallica, it was my brother who played it all the time locked up in his room, and played it on the guitar continuously, when he wasn´t playing the definitely more joyous songs of Jimi Hendrix.

And then, there was "One":

Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see: absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body's my holding cell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j39ABZyzek
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/metallica/one_20092051.html--------------------------------------------

I stop to think about why I am exploring so much this image of darkness as associated with being locked up in yourself. Well, it´s an image that has stayed stuck in my head for the last couple of months. I watched the film "le Scaphandre et Le Papillon" recently, the real-life story of a magazine editor who wakes up from a stroke that has left him with Locked-in Syndrome. He is paralyzed from head to toe, as well as vocally impaired. He can only move the muscle of his left eye. This left eye is his only, tiny window out onto the world outside him, and it is also his only means of communicating with other people. He not only manages to talk to people by blinking his eye; he writes a WHOLE BOOK by blinking his eye.

I cried and cried when I saw this movie. Then I bought the book and read it and cried even more. There was so much enclosed in this iconic scene of the bed-ridden man. There were the painfully bleak details of his room, the edge of his iron bed, the floaty curtains that let in a muted light, the television high up on the wall that he could not control. There were the painful details of his daily routine; being cleaned, being made to practice swallowing by trying to raise his tongue to the roof of his mouth, millimetrically.

But there was also everything that was happening inside his head. There were his voyages into his own imagination: happy memories and fantasy worlds, film-like scenes that paraded joyfully for him. A white-marble bust of the empress Eugénie, which the locked-in man saw whenever he was taken down the hospital corridor, provoked the wildest awake-dreams. He fantasized about encountering this young beauty, about sticking his nose amongst the folds of her striped gauze dress, smelling her imperial smell of cologne. He dreamt of other things too, he imagined other things too.

And here is where the magical reversal occured: being trapped inside was not just a negative darkness; it was freeing, it was the essence of freedom. With our minds we can do anything, go anywhere, feel anything we want. We have some control, we have our fingers on the switch. Everything is relative; being trapped inside is also being free to roam inside. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: the straight-jacket and the bird flight, the walls and the spirit that traverses the walls as if they were made of cottony fog...

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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I thought, was also an amazing image for the dilemma of I and the world, and by extension, I and you. Am I what is not-the-world, in a dichotomy of I vs objects outside of me? But aren´t we that which we perceive? Isn´t what I see, and what I apprehend also what I am? How much is the I the world? How much am I made up of the world outside me? Am I not that trajectory line, that leaping bridge, that butterfly´s flight, that dialectical journey between inside and outside? Shall we fall deeper into that phenomenological well, and think of how much of You is Me, and vice-versa?

Our relationships are made up of our attempts to reach out, to transmit our inner visions. The path is inevitably ridden with misunderstandings, misencounters. But it is precisely this blind path that connects us; where we reach out and try to say "I am this" and the other says "I am this" or "I am not this". And the other says "is this what you mean?", and you say, like TS Elliot*, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." (* http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html)


It´s a veritable miracle that we manage to communicate, to connect with other people. I am thinking of the courageous man existing in his body-tomb, his mind leaping and dancing inside his vaulted cave-body. How this man, Jean-Dominique Bauby, trapped in his diving-bell, unable to speak, unable to move, still managed to reach out to the world, and to speak to me, to try to tell me who he is (now he is no longer).

I salute you Jean-Do, your voyage-inthedark bears fruits everyday, you make my imagination leap, you make me appreciate the beauty and freedom of being trapped-inside.

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I am digressing, of course. I had meant to talk precisely about how my voyage-inthedark is not signifying darkness as despair, as sadness, as evil. I meant to talk about how I didn´t mean the darkness of the teenage head-banger. Or of the one trapped inside himself (and look where that brought me). I meant to explain how the name of my blog was about darkness as an unsad, perhaps even joyful not-knowing, as a euphoric not-seeing, as a "tatonner dans l'obscurité" --a blind man´s progress; feeling your way around the walls, with your hands out in order not to stumble and fall upon that which is there but you do not see. Or, now that another image starts to take shape in my head, it is also about a ship, at night, knowing its course, and yet not seeing what is around it. Il vogue, il vogue, le bateau. Or about a person whose eyes are closed, and what happens when she starts to open her eyes.

What is my voyage-inthedark? It is all these things and more. Darkness is not despair, it is joy in the not-seeing, not-knowing, thereby allowing the discovering, the starting-to-see. My darkness is this and something else. My darkness is more the something-else.

The eye of the storm

I spent my first week in Brazil at the beach, in Ubatuba, with Lilian and Lilian´s friends, jumping waves, sailing, eating churrasco, drinking, smoking up, and watching the samba schools parade on television, because it was carnaval.

Then I found myself back in the disturbing chaos of São Paulo, alone in a two-bedroom flat in a sixties building near the ever-throbbing Avenida Paulista. I was going to house-sit for a friend, who would be away in London for another three months. Blessed to be alone! I had a comfortable, fully-furnished apartment, a place full of colorful naif paintings, craftwork from all over Brazil, and Brazilian CDs galore to indulge my interest in rootsy music. The eight-floor apartment was a little island of tranquility and coolness, because it was unbearably hot at this time of the year.

At first I did not really know what to do with myself. There was such a long line of bureaucratic tasks awaiting me before I could properly get started with my life in Brazil: getting 3 X 4 photos to bring along with my birth certificate to the downtown Poupa Tempo, that kafkaesque yet strangely efficient and even pleasurable temple of endless paperwork processing. Getting my RG, which made me an official human being in the eyes of Brazilian law. Then getting my voter´s card, the "título de eleitor". Then the CPF, and the carteira de trabalho, and another myriad of pieces of paper that validated and proved my existence in this latitude.

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Not just hours, but sometimes even days went by between each complicated step of the long journey to acquiring an identity in my birthcountry. In my vacant hours, I sat home and roamed the internet looking for a job. And when I had enough of staring at the screen, I explored some new part of town, or went to the park, or sat in a boteco, and drank ice-cold beer, Bohemia, or Brahma, or Original, while I read the papers or jotted down my impressions on napkins that more often than not got wet from the beer, and proved to be illegible when I read them over again back in the apartment.

I felt strange, I felt suspended in a limbo state, in-between two lives, in-between two continents, in-between two stories of who I was. Everyday brought new impressions that left my head reeling at night with odd visions, and too-strong smells, and scenes that played themselves out over and over again in my head as I tried to decipher and make sense of them. Culture shock, full blasts of it, like being on a permanent hallucinogenic trip; and not being able to get off the carrousel that was now going too fast.

There was a certain melancholic peace to my staying alone in the flat. Solitary activities brought me comfort and some sense of stability in the midst of my emotional turmoil. I took my time to cook, put sheets and towels in the washing machine, wash delicate clothes, mop the floor, water the plants…

In that quiet place, I started paying attention to the little things. I started becoming more aware of the subtle differences in sounds, light, and color in this new hemisphere. I noticed, in the "área de serviço" where I hung my clothes to dry, how the latticed exterior wall filtered bright sunlight, and how this softened light painted moorish patterns on the opposite wall. I learned the best time to sit in the living room to catch the little direct sunlight that penetrated the apartment for just a few hours.

Lying in my bed or sitting in the living room, I discovered a whole new collection of sounds, a continuous "bourdonnement". I started waking up at five in the morning with the roaring sounds of the first buses climbing up steep Brigadeiro Luis Antonio, training my ear to pick the momentary gaps in sound that signified the shifting of gears. And during the day there were always layers and layers of noise, fom the high-pitched voices and children's yelling from the buildings nearby, to the more indistinct drone coming from thousands of cars and buses and motorcycles, and endless building sites and pavement renovations and street repairs all over the city.


It was summer, and I experienced for the first time in a long time the constant extremes of rain and sun; very hot sun, very constant rain. I grew accustomed to sitting by the window, watching the city under the rain: the two towering blocks that faced each other, framing each side of my window, with hundreds of little square windows at which sat other lonesome figures smoking, playing computer games, watching TV (or so I thought from the bluish glare that reflected at night on the propped-up glass panes); the clump of green down below, with a tall solitary tree that masked the little playground underneath, and from which emerged strange bird cries at the strangest times of night; and the small football/basketball court annexed to the garden.

And beyond all this, on the other side of Brigadeiro Luis Antonio, there was a parking lot, and next to the parking lot, the building site, with a crane and another gigantic machine that pounced the ground in the morning like Gulliver´s sledge hammer, planting the structural pillars that would later hold the weight of a whole building. Early in the morning, I heard its dull thudding, I felt it pounding my brain into the pillow, into the thin mattress, and into the ground below the mattress.

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I had brought dozens of old photographs of my childhood, which I taped up on the bedroom wall opposite the bed to form a kind of mnemonic mosaic. Something about this apartment triggered a bitter-sweet feeling; a nostalgia for things past, for childhood, for a moment that could never be relived, Brazil in the 70s and 80s. I would lie in bed, and let hazy memories wash over me, I would sink in a strange state of contemplation, watching my memories play out on my mind's screen. I drifted into scenes where I was playing in the club, feeling the hot yellow stones under my feet, spending all day in the water, watching the ends of my fingers wrinkle up like pale dried raisins. The industrial, clinical smell of chlorinated skin. Drinking fresh fruit juice, mamao and abacaxi and orange juice with carrot juice. Always going around bare-foot. The foliage of childhood.

I thought longingly about Brasilina, my old nanny, the woman that had been with me from my birth and had disappeared from my life when I was seven, when our family had left Brazil heading for Santiago. I wanted to find her. She would have been very old by now; she had disappeared, sunk back into my past. I asked my mother about her. "Nathalie, surely she is dead by now!" she said. I inquired what she had known about her, where she´d come from. My mother said: "She came with the apartment". My parents rented an apartment on Alameda Jaú, and she came with it. Like Luciano said, "sabe aqueles doces que vêm com brinquedinho?" The little toys you got when you bought sweets? The tattoo you´d get with buballoo bubblegum?

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There was one week in particular, towards the end of my first month in Brazil, when I wanted to cry all the time. I felt a secret happiness at the core of my sadness; it was a bizarre and destabilizing sensation of being extremely happy and extremely sad at the same time.

One day I had an aha! moment. I saw that I had dropped to the very bottom of a well that was saudade itself. Suddenly I thought, "I'm almost breaking, because this is too strong a dose of saudade, I'm in the eye of a very beautiful but very dangerous storm." Saudade: I was so extremely sensitive, les nerfs a fleur-de-peau, as we say in French.

What is saudade? I googled it up: "a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return." Amazing, how could there be a word that contained so much? Saudade: "Uma coisa profunda e leve ao mesmo tempo, triste e alegre."

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With the rainy weather, I started getting extremely strong allergies; constant sneezing, watery eyes, an eternally itchy nose. I bought extra-strength pills, because that´s what the pharmacist sold me: prescription strength, the kind of stuff that required a doctor´s note. He gave it to me as if it were a mild dose of aspirin. Little did I know how my carelessness would bring me down.

I could have never foreseen the pills´ mind-blowing effect. Within half an hour, I started feeling short of breath. I felt mysef going hot and cold. I started pacing the apartment, obsessively going over all the tasks left undone that day: I hadn´t called up job agencies, I hadn´t done my laundry, I hadn´t called the port of Santos to see what was up with my boxes, I hadn´t bought a converter for my computer, I hadn´t uploaded my beach photos from my camera, and most terribly, I hadn´t performed the latest required fragment of bureaucratic activity to get my name made official in this god-forsaken freaky monster of a country. That´s how I felt: like the immensity of Brazil, and the immensity of my forecoming duties to get established here, were just about to swallow me whole. I felt myself spiralling down, dropping down, and down, and down. I felt my pulse, and it seemed too fast, or too faint, and I had an attack of hypocondria, or what others might call, a panick attack. What had I done, how had I left everything behind, what the hell was I doing here? My heart was beating very fast. And then I hallucinated that it wasn´t beating at all. Taquicardia, I later read in the medication´s list of possible side-effects.

I called Luciano, my new friend, and blurted out that I wanted him to come over right away. I tried to convey to him that somehow I was losing my grip on things. I don't think he realized how scared I was, how absolutely terrified I was at that moment. He arrived quite fast, and took me to a padaria where we bought cake and juice, and as I talked to him and tried to explain to him what had happened, the effects of that strong drug started softening.

The rest of the night passed in a blur. But that voyage into the eye of the storm left ripples inside me for quite a while. It is hard to recall those first-days feelings now. I have been growing accustomed to things here lately. And sometimes, I even experience nostalgia, a strange feeling of loss, of wanting to feel the fear again. I seem to have a love-hate relationship with roller-coaster emotions. Perhaps it´s just an addiction to change.

The dream-bird that lost its colours

He was a plumed, sequined serpent, a beautiful and strange snake that scintillated as he danced to the beat of the music. He ondulated on stage, mesmerizing us with his tattooed body, the inky tribal rings around his thighs, his tight-fitting, majestic headdress, his gold mask, his kohl-rimmed eyes. His antique, blackened eyes flashed, throwing darts at us from a distance.

He was sensual, absurdly seductive when he changed costumes right there on stage, or rather, undressed, scandalizing us with his string thong, his strong buttocks, his bulge. He had firm, wide shoulders, slender muscular arms, and he liked to stand in profile and throw a leg out and set his foot on a velvet sofa to emphasize the outline of his leg, of his body in profile, like an Egyptian painting. Tall blue feathers bursting out of his head, he would turn suddenly with a swish, and like a feline demon prance around the stage. He pranced around like a hungry tiger, and lingered in a corner, singing, and almost dancing with one of his musicians, enticing him.

The tempo of the music increased, he started jerking, twisting, hopping absurdly about like a mad Indian god, a cross of a tiger and a divine monkey, reincarnating after his bird-snake life. He changed his adornments again, always seducing us with his poses. He lay a wide gold Egyptian necklace across his chest. He turned and gave his naked back to the audience. A tattooed back, wide black lines following his spine. An Aztec god he was, or perhaps a sacrifice, ready to be thrown into a great big cauldron in a distant mountain.

The artist, at sixty-something-years-old, was a spectacle that belonged to another time, to the decadence of pre-war cabaret life in Germany, combined with the decadence of 80s, new-to-AIDS Brazil, mixed with the eternal exhuberance of Amazonian animal life. He was the very embodiment of the carnivalesque, an ode to life, to primordial forces. He was an explosion of colours, shine, gloss, sparkle. He was an incarnation of macunaima, the trickster indian. He was Ney Matogrosso.

I remember the man from my Brazilian chilhood, the singer with the high voice. His recent show was on an August night; he performed in a cold, dark space, a theater with the name of a bank, an impersonal space with hundreds of tables where people sat eating their cheese and ham canapes and drinking their beers and caipirinhas. People did not stand during the show, people did not dance to accompany the beautiful bird-snake's rapturous flights across the stage. They sat and watched and consumed and asked for more cachaca and another round of beer and a few more portions of olives, please?

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This whole scene symbolizes what happened to my dream of Brazil. The technicolor spectacle-dream of my birthplace seemed to turn grey when I started to settle into the reality of Sao Paulo. After the euphoria of arrival and the strangeness of culture shock, things morphed into a kind of oppressive flatness. A bit like the exhuberant bird-like singer I went to see a couple of weeks ago, trapped in the indistinct, soulless, corporate theater, trapped in the Zona Sul of Sao Paulo, old swamp land where new office buildings are built by the dozens or even by the hundreds, and where the grey-brown hazyness of condensed pollution hangs in the air permanently.

I have been searching for a way back to the exhilaration I associated with Brazil when I was most far away from the country.

My image of the country where I hadn't lived for twenty years was slowly built up, it was an amalgam of experiences and stories and symbols that I acquired in London only recently. As an adult, I hadn't been in touch with the culture at all, or if I had, it had been in a distant and formulaic way. When I watched the World Cup, I always rooted for Brazil. If I went to Portugal on vacation, I tried out my rusty Portuguese and was delighted to see that people recognized my accent as Brazilian.

I had memories of Brazil, but they were wispy and static, frozen scenes that felt as if I'd snatched them from a book or a movie or from somebody else's acid trip. I remembered the Bandeirantes monument, a mass of yellowish stone, a bunch of men standing in the middle of some avenue next to a park, a bunch of men pulling something but I couldn't recall what exactly it was that they were pulling. I remembered learning how to swim in the Clube Paulistano's huge swimming pool. I remembered my mother putting mascara on my lashes when I was four years old, readying me for my very important role as a bride at the Festas Juninas. But despite these memories, sometimes it really felt as if I'd made up my past in Brazil. Somehow it felt like I'd never lived there at all, or perhaps only in a previous life.

I came to know Brazil again in a beautiful yet most improbable way. In London, I started working at a Brazilian magazine doing their PR and organizing events. I was immediately thrown into a whirlwind of cultural life. Miraculously, I had landed a job that didn´t pay much yet felt like a permanent vacation.

I still remember my first boat party on the Thames. We hired a boat that stayed moored, yet threatened to take off into never-never land, such was the glowing energy that the party produced. Three different dance rooms, playing funk carioca, tropicalia music, hits from the eighties, Seu Jorge, forro,afro-grooves, and downstairs, in the hidden depths of the boat, under the water, it was heavy-duty electronica, minimal and trance, and other types of mushroomy sounds, where people got off on laughing gas and lost themselves in the pumping beats. And in the other rooms, samba-rock, most importantly, beats, beats, beats, and warmth, people touching, smiling, laughing.

And there were such lines to get in! Of course there were the regulars, and those who had read about the party in our magazine or in TimeOut. But there were also people leaving the infamous (and cheap) Australian pub across the street, and people who had been strolling along the Thames after a river-side dinner meal, and East London kids heading for Schoolnight parties in West London, and young boys from out of town looking for some action: everyone seemed to be eager to check out what it was all about. Any party with a long line to get in MUST be out of this world. As the clock struck twelve, the line became even more absurdly long, and the people at the entrance, at the caixa and with the guest list (which included me) went into a frenzied mode to get everyone in and take in the much-needed dough. It seemed as though from the street, people literally saw the fumes of happiness steam or a rainbow aura around the boat.

Brazil in London, Brazil from afar, collapsed all social and cultural differences into one big colourful happy party. There were Brazilians, Brits, Spaniards, French, Indian and other London variations of lost nomads from the world over. There were people from the embassy, from sponsoring companies, from the business world, and there were artists, musicians, officer workers, motoboys, manicures, pub workers; they were black, white, brown, young, old, cool, nerdy; it was a beautiful zoo.

I want to find the Brazil that I knew in London, the hallucination that possessed me and that compelled me to come back, to feel it all pulsating in me.

Here are some mementos from that happy time, press releases I sent out to the media, exaggerating, embellishing and yet providing a true snapshot of Brazilian life in London.


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COLLAGE N 2
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AUGUST 2006

TWO OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN THE UK BRASILIAN SCENE JOIN FORCES TO BRING YOU THE HAPPIEST DANCE BASH OF THE SUMMER HELPING STREET CHILDREN IN BRASIL

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JungleDrums Magazine, purveyor of London’s best Brasilian-flavoured boat bashes, has joined forces with special guest DJ Cliffy of Batmacumba fame to host the happiest party of the summer, with part of the proceeds going to Ruas e Praças, a Brasilian charity for street children.

The notorious Cliffy is a music writer, producer and one of the most successful global beat deejays in Europe. This Brasil-lover has deejayed in over 25 countries from Canada to China and hosts Batmacumba (usually at the ICA), the longest running Brasilian club-night in England (9 years), a multi-media event combining films, photography, graffiti, dance, capoeira and much more. We’re very proud to present the Batmacumba Room, featuring the man himself playing the amazing sounds he’s collected from down under.

But there’s loads of wicked stuff going on in the other rooms too! Just fresh off the coolest outdoors festival on the Thames this year, JungleDrums will be back on the boat with the sounds and DJs that most roused the crowd. The DJ sets at Brasil Tô Dentro! (our festival that pulled over 30’000 people to the South Bank on July 2) attracted every dancing creature in London from aging Elvis impersonators to hard clubbers willing to brave the sub-tropical temperatures and sunshine to bounce around joyfully.

Our downstairs Reaction Room will bring back this electric atmosphere, with funky, progressive and electro house care of crazy collective Djs Marcio Groove, Lucas Datt and Alec Fasani. This is the zaniest room, gathering shiny, happy people turbo-charged with energy.

And last but not least, Booty Beats Room is back too! Why change anything when the recipe works? Stay in this room and you’ll shake your booty all night to badass Baile Funk, and new contemporary urban music, with a dash of Drum’n ’Bass thrown in, courtesy of DJ S.P.Y., and the unbeatable Herman ♥s Pauline.

As we’re all warming up for carnival, the dress-code is pre-carnival, so bring out the exhuberant bird of the night in you: dress up and go way over-the-top in true Brasilian style. Masks, sequins, feathers, body paint, translucent fabric, tiny outfits and vertiginous heels are encouraged!


(check out some of the artwork for these parties at http://www.jungledrums.org/boatparty/ or http://www.jungledrums.org/sambatralia/)

Imagined homelands

This image of mountain and water and sky has a strong hold on me. I have had it inside me as far as I can remember.

My father must have drawn that mountain landscape for me dozens, perhaps hundreds of times since I was a toddler. "Please papa, can you draw it again?" On any kind of paper, with a pencil or pen or crayon, he would sketch that scene, with bold, sure lines he would etch it out. I try to think of the order in which the elements were placed on paper. Somehow they always came together in the same way.

First, the wide curve of the lake, usually on the lower right side of the paper. Then, a series of disconnected up and down strokes in the upper third of the sheet that together formed a craggly mountain chain. And finally, the village, on the left side of the lake, at just the spot where we might imagine the beginnings of the mountains slopes. A bunch of little boxes with triangular roofs, outlines of houses really, unspecific, symbols of houses practically. Perhaps there was a church, recognizable by its high tower and a cross, but I'm not sure. Above the village, a few rows of pine trees scattered about, also drawn very fast, with minimal lines. What I am sure of is the strong shape of the mountains, and a few vs drawn in the sky to signify birds. He had always had a talent for drawing. He drew with sharp, strong strokes. Almost telegraphic dashes, usually black, etched with his Parker pen, or perhaps with Caran d'Ache black pencils. No colours usually, no filling in of blue and brown and green.

The picture probably represented St. Moritz, the town near Pontresina that had a lake and where his godmother, Tanta Orsi, lived. Infinite versions of this picture were produced for me, but always drawn in the same way, always containing the same elements. I eventually came to draw it myself, more awkardly and more exhuberantly, making full use of my coloured pencils, employing an absurd array of shades of turquoise and aqua and cobalt blue for the lake and the sky.

But his black, minimalist mountains were the original prototype. He was very good at technical drawing, and for my brothers, he delected himself producing drafts of planes, machinery, architectural landscapes. For me, at least as far as I can recall, he drew that iconographic landscape, an archetypal mountain valley that he carried inside at all times and in all places of the world, and which he inevitably transmitted and engraved in my own consciousness as if I myself had been born there.


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The drawn landscape is one thing that represented faraway Switzerland for me. The image would be confirmed whenever we went to visit grandmother nona. I knew it was not invented, it was not abstract in the way that an elephant or a tiger might be, things you would see on TV and in children's books but would never live with. The mountains were where my grandmother lived, and where papa had grown up with a huge extended family full of cousins, and where we went on vacation every two years, crossing the ocean, enduring transatlantic flights from Sao Paulo to Zurich that had a stopover in Africa, in Dakar actually, to refuel. All I remember of those stopovers, when we did not even leave the plane, was a brownish colour -- in my mind's eye I can only see a golden-brown light, and earthy hues.

The Swissair flights were also an essential part of our Swiss cosmology. We were never afraid of flying. Aside from the exciting visits to the cockpit, which my father made sure would happen on almost every occasion, we enjoyed getting the hot wet towels to wash our hands and faces and ears and whatever else needed washing, and then eating airplane food in its cute containers, and we loved getting the stuff that was meant to shut us up, namely, sets of playing cards, memory cards, puzzles, coloured crayons, colour-by-number sheets and little wooden clowns and horses that jerked about when you pushed your thumb into their base, the wire coil inside making the little marionnettes come alive. And oh the extasis, for the little girl that I was, of the small necessaires containing earplugs, a mini-comb, a mini-toothbrush, and a tiny, tiny toothpaste.

Papa made it very clear that flying was safer than any mode of transport, as he would explain that the amazing forces that held the plane aloft were stronger than those that could get it down. He would describe in extreme detail to my brothers and to me exactly how besides the engines it was also currents and drafts that maintained that steel bird up in the air.

Our father, aside from being a supreme purveyor of mountain drawings and F-16 blueprints, was also a meteorology expert. He knew absolutely everything there was to know about the weather, about atmospheric conditions, winds and clouds and storms. He would describe, analyze and interpret the size and shape and colour of clouds, lecture on details of precipitation, air pressure, and so on. This wondrous knowledge may have come to him from his having been an airplane pilot (of small aircraft and gliders), or it may have come from his military service training (I have kept his innumerable fascicles of Swiss military manuals, very thin beige-coloured books printed with intricate, detailed diagrams full of arrows), or even from his boy scout years. Or it may have been knowledge he had simply because he was a mountain boy, a true Swiss mountain boy.

There were many other things that came to represent Switzerland for us during our childhood growing up in South America, including the snow igloos we built in front of our nona's house, the ducks we fed at lake Zurich with our maternal grandmother, the trips to Franz Karl Weber, the huge toy store, as well as riding trams, sledding in the Zollikon forest, and holding paper "lampions" with lit candles inside while watching 1st of August bonfires.

But I now know that the mountains are some of the strongest links we have with that country we only came to know in spurts, in short yet intense bursts, but that became real to us through the stories and images that were given to us unawares.

The land and the city

I've been feeling apprehensive about writing here again, because I haven't written in more than three weeks. I haven't known where to start.

During this time away from the blog, I was taken into another reality. I spent two weeks in Switzerland, my (or at least my parents') so-called native country, where I visited friends and family. I stayed in Geneva and Zurich, I went to the lake and to the mountains. I went to the lake and the mountains. This image is crucial...

The two weeks felt like less and more time at once. The quality of the experience affected my sense of time. Time is by no means a stable, defined thing. Time felt different because of where I was. Switzerland acquires a different sheen everytime I go. So the two days I spent in the Engadine mountains, for instance, up in my father's birthplace, had the viscous depth of experience of several weeks.

By the time I got back to Sao Paulo, my state of mind was radically different from the one I had when I left. I really was at a loss, thinking of the blog. A thousand possible beginnings. But as I mulled over where to start, there was a glimmer of hope. An idea hit me. A pinecone detached itself from the tree under which I sat in confusion, as it were. Reader, imagine the scene: watch the pinecone fall from the branch in slow, slow motion, and hit my forehead, and watch me stare at this pinecone in the dewy grass, pondering this new realization. The realization was this: that I should start precisely by exploring the source of my uncomfortableness, by getting to the root of my indecision.

Well, this pinecone, it is a familiar one: I am once again in that weird in-between state. In-between-worlds state of mind. Un pied ici et un pied la-bas.

Here is an image, or rather, the juxtaposition of two scenes, that expresses this weird feeling. I was in Brazil twenty-four hours after being high up in the Swiss alps. Absurd and impossible to process: I was entering Sao Paulo's outskirts in a taxi in heavy traffic, a day after waking up at the heart of a glacier's valley, next to a mountain river that roars, and that flows down with such turbulence that when you peer into it, you only see white, and then bits of very, very milky light green. The river that roars flows next to an old stone house, an eighteenth-century hunter's cabin that belongs to the family, that is a timeless capsule trapped in a mountain valley.

Back there, back in my father's Engadin, I stood on the field in front of the stone house, next to the river, and looked up, and from all sides was surrounded by peaks, brown mountain sides with bursts of green, interspersed among the grey of eroded rock. I stood there and saw the dry dark green of pine trees at the base of the mountains, the brown and grey of the mountain side, the occasional white of snowy peaks, and above a very blue sky with the wispiest of white clouds. 48 hours later I was trapped in a bus on that busy street, Joaquim Floriano, at the heart of smoggy, heartless Itaim, surrounded on all sides by black and silver little boxes, the sound of horns and the roar of buses substituting the roar of the river. Minutes earlier, I had looked at the horizon beyond all the towers of Itaim and Vila Olimpia and Vila Nova Conceiçao, down St Amaro Avenue, I had seen a yellow-beige blending into the light blue of the sky, and the so-called white clouds had actually looked like soiled sheets, yes, like white sheets soiled with urine.

Winter in Sao Paulo: the air is unbearably dry and it has only rained twice in five weeks. Newspresenters daily announce a new state of alert because of the low humidity in the air and the unprecedented levels of pollution. In Veja magazine, I saw an appaling picture of the city, showing a muddled brown-blue sky over the skyscrapers, a truly asfixiating curtain of smog falling upon the city.

Yesterday, on my second day back from Switzerland, from the mountains and the stone house and the river, a man who sat next to me in the bus randomly started a conversation with me, or rather, a monologue. The scene fit perfectly into the movie of my in-between world.

"You know, they say that human beings are rational. But are they really rational?", he wondered.

Oh, I knew what was coming. After all, he had been peering out the window like me, and the same bizarre scenario presented itself to him. The man was middle-aged, wore small wire-rimmed glasses; he looked into my eyes with great intensity.

"Actually man is irrational", he continued. "Why else would such a large chunk of humankind actually choose to live all together, packed in a single spot? Instead of spreading out, everyone insists on being in this one overcrowded spot. Man has traded quality of life for this (he gestured meaningfully towards what lay beyond the window). Consuming, buying... Do we need to have so many cars? How have we come to this, will it never stop?," he said in one breathless burst.

"Fui internado numa UTI, I went into ER with a respiratory problem, turned out I had pneumonia. And mind you, I used to be a marathon runner, I had lungs of steel. This is happening because of the p-o-l-l-u-t-i-o-n that is killing us all. I have seen many young children, and middle-aged people, and old people dying of this, " he said with priest-like fervor. I agreed with everything he said; but I was afraid his speech would turn evangelical soon.

"Why do we buy so much? Why do we have clothes sitting at home when they could be distributed to the poor?" He was right, but I still didn't know if he was just getting things off his chest, or was preparing to hit me for money for some good-cause association inevitably linked to a new unorthodox form of protestantism. "I work for an NGO, Medicos sem fronteira. I am not young, I am 52 years old. It is up to young people to fight against desmatamento in the Amazon, Mato Grosso etc etc etc".

The man spoke in a still and steady voice, but his eyes looked sad and distant and perplexed; I could only nod and let him speak, and wonder wny these strange movie-like scenes always seem to happen to me. "Do you know that land in those states is being bought by foreigners? Massive lots, just disappearing into the hands of foreigners. They buy out local politicians, corrupt politicians, coronels. And they are buying up land and we will have no more control, for who knows what they are doing with this land." He peered deeply into my eyes over his glasses, and held my gaze for a few moments waiting for his words to fully sink in. "Developed countries don't have space anymore, they need to spread, It's a new wave of colonization, and so they are coming here and taking it. And what are we doing about it? What are we doing about it, I ask you?" Despite the slightly paranoid sound to it all, he touched me. Indeed, what was I doing about anything, what could I do about any of this?

But really, when the man in the bus spoke of man's irrationality, really, I started thinking about my own irrationality. How had I willingly parachuted myself into this irrational reality? Indeed, what the hell was I doing in this slow-moving bus caught in traffic like a legless turtle, surrounded by thousands of high-rise buildings...

I got off the bus to go to work, but he had hit a nerve. It wasn't like I wished I were living in Switzerland again, not at all. But I had been thinking of my need for nature, for a stronger connection with the land. I had been thinking about the impact that the land of my father had on me, and how relatively unspoiled it was, and how our family attempted to maintain and conserve some part of the past with the hunter's cabin. And I thought of the cabin's policy of no electricity; the oil lamps, the wooden stove, the lack of toilets and showers, the water that had to be fetched with old iron buckets at a secret water hole, as it always had been in the faraway past.

Meanwhile, the Roseg glacier continues to melt, the snow line rises steadily every year. I am becoming acutely aware of a terrible fear inside. I am becoming conscious of the fragility of it all. I am so afraid that it is all disappearing.

Land used to be an inherent part of your identity. It was part of who you are. Land was passed on from generation to generation. The land linked you to your ancestors. Who you were was linked to your ancestors.

I read in a book by Cees Noteboom, describing the indigenous people of Australia who are living in urban centers: "the Aborigines (...) were like human driftwood- people who had lost their ancestral ties and therefore no longer belonged anywhere."

What happens when you no longer have that relationship to the land, when you are always in transit, unattached to a strip of land? Is it of no surprise that we feel more transient? But still I wonder, do we not always carry, deep inside us, a memory of the land, or lands, that our ancestors came from?

What relationship do I have with the land when I'm in the city? What relationship do I have with this city, this Sao Paulo? It seems sometimes like a place that I just traverse. I am always in transit, on my way somewhere, and then I arrive and go indoors. And hear the roar of the "transito", millions of people moving across the city, their cars inching their way over the tarmac that has been laid over the old swamps of lower Sao Paulo, over streams and rivers that have been forgotten because they are no longer seen. But that still pulsate underground.

The box, the fall, and the looking-glass...

It was not what I was after. What I wrote yesterday made me feel too light, too one-eyed, like a cyclop with no peripheral vision. Being funny, if I was funny at all, is easy. Or at least, it isn’t hard. But after I wrote, I felt I had betrayed something. I had condensed the experience, taken things out of the flux, out of the unordered order in which they happened, out of the context or landscape or way in which they existed when I first encountered them. I made a list, and took out the feeling out of each thing on the list. I regulated the temperature, I established one climate, and one climate only, because I’d decided it was easier that way.

I chose one side, when the truth is that I could always see two, three or more sides at once. This choosing one side made the writing sound unlike me, and more like some Lonely Planet whore, like someone who has an audience in mind.

When I write explaining things to myself, everything comes out very differently than when I write picturing a person, or several persons, reading. I am already having a dialogue, or a three-way conversation when I’m explaining things to myself. I ‘m already presenting things this way, and then that way, and then juxtaposing that other view from that third angle. But when I get outside of me and try to find a point to focus on, to make it easier for that imaginary reader, I lose all the other points.

And why, why did I look outward, write outside of me, try to make it easier for that imaginary reader? Why did I slot myself into a predictable narrative? Yes, perhaps I have a clue. Writing about what I went through, and what I’ve been going through, with no particular order, or goal, was becoming uncomfortable, it was starting to itch, and so I interrupted the unplanned, unexpected flow of things that were appearing. I created a diversion, I interrupted because it was too much. Plunging inside one self and inside the world and inside god knows what was just too heavy.

And here is, after all, finally, at last, what I felt, often, in my first few weeks here; with not much comic relief to soften the disorienting blow of culture shock. I felt: moving to Brazil: like opening a great, terrible Pandora’s box.

There was no going back, I had unleashed all the scary demons, or rather, opened the door to another world, huge, larger than everything I’d ever known, unknowable, overwhelming, ungraspable. I would try to teeter on the edge and hold on for dear life, not wanting to fall into the vortex, the whirlwind. The immensity of Brazil, of Sao Paulo. This feeling of being about to be buried alive. Tall buildings congregating around me, high above me, pressing me against the ground, the endless streets and avenues pulsating with the insect-like traffic. The multiplicity of realities, types of people, consciousnesses.

At times I realized almost with horror that it would have been easier to stay put, in London, in Europe, and not have opened up this door to this crazy world. And not just to this crazy world, but to that past that insisted on slipping away, in metamorphosing into a dream.

It was becoming clear and evident that I would be changed by my experience here, by this place. And there was a feeling of wanting to hold on to who I was, or who I had been. I did not want to be transformed. Things that I had known to be true, values and ways of being that I considered real, were discarded or discounted here. It was painful to let go of the known; the desire was to hold on for dear life, to the self and to the ways that I knew, that I was familiar with. But these so-called familiar ways… These were recent ways; I had known Brazil a long time ago, but I had lost it. I didn’t know it anymore, but perhaps I could know it again.

The truth was that stepping into Brazil felt like stepping into an adolescent world, an adolescent way of thinking. With all its intensity, and impatience, and innocence, and stubbornness, and contradictions, and lack of experience, and arrogance, and know-it-all attitude, and appalling lack of reference points and wisdom and experience. I wanted to set the clock back to my world, to the supposed adulthood of Europe.

But I was wrong to think of the country and its life as adolescent. The old world and the new world were not on the same timeline. I used to think that Brazil was merely Europe a few years or decades behind. Then it became clear that Brazil was on a different path all together, and that it would never join up with Europe’s path. They had crossed perpendicularly a long time ago, and then the whole graph had exploded and the timelines and paths had gotten sucked into a vortex, got whipped up in a tornado. And each path was stubbornly walking its own way. Could I have a foot in both of them, in both realities?

As a matter of fact, the two realities co-existed, or were the same reality on two different sides of a two-sided mirror. And I was in the mirror. No, I was the mirror itself, separating and joining and reflecting both realities.

What I always wanted to know about Brazil but was afraid to ask/find out…

Since my last few entries have been rather melancholic, their mood heading increasingly downward, and the slope of nostalgia becoming dangerously steep for a blog, and to avoid going into a series of flashbacks that will have me wondering what the heck I’m still doing in Brazil, I thought I’d go back to a more light-hearted tone, and comment on a few disconcerting things I discovered during my first weeks in Brazil…

- Newspapers have an incredibly high number of ads for high-rise apartment buildings, (as a matter of fact, you will find fewer news articles than ads), complete with pools, palm trees, 3 bathrooms per bedroom, ground –floor fully equipped gyms with bullet-proof panoramic views of Champs Elysees-style landscaped gardens, and hundreds of miserably-paid labourers to make this whole Disney-type garden of eden operate.

- If you’re me, you will learn to match name of high-rise building to decade and style of architecture. Above-mentioned buildings will usually have spanky Americanitis names like Coral Gables, Wall Street, Flamingo Towers. You will try to decide whether you prefer these names to the multitude of 80s and 90s architectural monstrosities with more sophisticated European names like Grenoble, Montpellier, Cap D’Antibes, Amalfi, or those Mediterannean, sophisticated Italian-renaissance style buildings with names of Italian renaissance artists, Mansão Da Vinci etc. Or you might just settle for 60s buildings with indigenous names like Ubiratã, Maiara, or 50s buildings with names of women like Maria Estela, Solange, Valentina and so on. My personal favorite is an ugly, blackened 40s building called Poesia. Apparently they had a sense of irony in the 40s.

- Water: you will spend an inordinate amount of time and energy buying and transporting water as it’s so hot everyday that you will suffer from constant dehydration- resulting in parched mouth, bad hair, and more eye wrinkles. Better call one of the countless little shops that offer the indispensible service of "water delivery": huge water dispensers brought to your front door, with men earning slave-labour wages transporting six or seven of these 20 liter-dispensers on carts and bicycles up and down steep hills, bringing one right inside your kitchen, and still giving you a smile when you realize you’ve got no change to reward them for their hard work.

- And while we’re on the subject, When it rains, it pours. You must never forget to shut all windows before you leave the house, lest you come home to huge puddles of water, wet clothes you left draped over the chair by the window, and flooded keyboard when your computer is by the window. As well, never buy cheap umbrellas from street vendors as they are programmed to self-destruct within fifteen minutes of opening. And finally, never decide to get on a bus, or head downtown in you own car when the rain starts. You might never return home again. Seriously.

- Never let the lady at the salon who’s waxing your legs and your bikini line come near you with a clear plastic bottle simply labeled “removedor”. This industrial-strength household product will be brought out to remove wax from your bikini or underwear. It smells suspiciously like turpentine (which is normally used to clean up paint brushes and rolls while wearing gloves) and will inevitably burn your “epidermis”, leaving a large patch of dark, papery, purple-colored skin, that will slowly (over a period of a few weeks) detach itself from your lower abdomen, flapping uncomfortably until it simply falls off, revealing a brand new bubblegum-pink layer of raw skin underneath.

- Plastic surgeons offer indispensable services like laser hair removal and face peels. The waiting room is an elegant island of peace, with cream-coloured modern sofas, and a coffee station -- a mahogany buffet with state-of-the art cappuccino machine flanked by two pots of pink orchids. The coffee-table boasts a range of national and foreign magazines, the walls are decorated with rare still-life paintings, the air-conditioning is silent and looks like a giant I-pod. After all, Brazil has perfected the cult of perfection. Saturdays are for manicures, pedicures, hair-straightening, special chocolate moisturizing hair treatments, waxing, lasering away body hair, varicose vein zapping , lymph-node massaging to eradicate cellulite, tooth-whitening, teeth-straightening, jaw reduction, and nose removal.


- Plentiful hired help- Every shop, business, gym, bookstore, English school, restaurant, café, and even sweets stand, will have at least three, if not four, five or six guys wearing an ill-fitting dark suit and tie in 35-degree heat hired to observe the general goings-on in the surrounding perimeter of the said business, to perform some kind of not-quite-defined security function (or perhaps social function: they usually smile at you and say hello and know everything about you after your first two visits); as well as seven, eight or ten less well-dressed guys (called manobristas) earning less than minimum wage hired to park your car in obscure little side streets (as there is no way you’d spend 92 minutes circling the block or the entire neighborhood just to find a miserable parking space). They also seem to perform a shooing-away-street kids function. Every above-mentioned business will also have a batallion of cleaning ladies earning the wage of security man + wage of manobrista divided by 15, who will mop the floor every fifteen minutes, empty waste baskets every 10 minutes, and carry soapy water buckets up and down flights of stairs all day long.
(This comment is not meant to denigrate the work of these people, but rather to call attention to the medieval time/colonial style class-structure/wage difference where 10% of the population needs an army of servants everywhere they step. Unfortunately I am inevitably part of this 10%. I don't know how to rebel against this state of affairs. And by the way, these are invented statistics, but you can look up the real ones on the internet and you'll get my drift.)

- Sunday barbecues in the neighbouring building. The Salão de Festas, complete with the outdoor patio that is attached to every narrow building in the central neighborhoods of São Paulo, exists because people love to throw big parties but don’t have enough space in their 100’000 dollars a square-meter apartments. You will learn to either enjoy, or at least put up with a) the amorphous, high-pitched sound of loads of women cackling and amorphous, slightly more baritone sound of loads of men impressing each other with stories and lots of expletives (caraaaaaaaalho being a favourite); b) pumped up sound system (meaning heavy bass) medley of pagode (sugar-sweet, watered-down samba), bad eighties music, and hits by mega kid entertainer Xuxa; or if the party is a bit more trendy, pumped up sound of hard-core electro, minimal, trance, psy-trance, and other mushroomy variations of electronic music; c) drunken singing along to out-of-tune guitar, after sound-system has gone bust due to insufficient power or generalized city black-out; d) the sound of hundreds of children screeching (actually it will only be a dozen, but as Brazilians loooove children and think that loudness is a sign of happiness, it will sound like hundreds), d) arguments over whether the ball hit the inside or outside of the goalpost coming from the football/basketball/volleyball/skateboarding court adjacent to the patio and salão de festas.

- When you buy your cell phone, which will be not only pre-paid, but (illegally) registered in someone else’s name (the dear best friend) it will inevitably be stolen within at most two weeks. It will probably be stolen when you least expect it, for instance, when you are giving first-aid to a person whose leg has just got hit by a bomb at a demonstration against Bush that’s turned sour. The thief will be someone who looks like a passionately well-meaning, high-morals student, complete with overgrown hair, Che Guevara T-shirt, Palestinian kerchief and Adidas trainers, and who will offer, just when you’re shouting for “an ambulance, a doctor, a nurse, a fireman, what the fuck??!! somebody call the emergency number!!", the guy will offer, as I was saying, to call the emergency number from your cell phone, and will then mysteriously vanish into the panicked crowd, in a cloud of laughing gas, and other types of unidentified “light” artillery, of the "just rubber" type that leaves 1-inch holes in your back.
- If this should happen to you, it is highly recommended that you immediately let the police know, by going online and filling out a form for the BO (meaning, not body odor, obviously, but boletin de ocorrencia.) Stolen cell phones are inevitably traced back to prisons where inmates use pre-paid mobiles to make their plans to take over Brazil and the world. As you do not want your best friend, in whose name you registered the phone, to be accused of being intimately involved with the top bosses of the PCC (criminal mafia prison group), you better pray a lot.

The other Park

The journey of recollection is beset by traps. Armadilhas. Although I was so happy to have found my park, I had nagging doubts about whether it really was “the one”. What if I were just fooling myself, willing the park to be the iconic one of my shadowy memories? That day when I got reacquainted with it, I walked along its paths and found it familiar and alien at the same time. I saw people (mostly young, possibly unemployed men) sitting on benches, dog-walkers, an abnormally low number of joggers, and a man practicing yoga in a corner by a huge figueira tree. I convinced myself that this was the park. But I had no scientific evidence.

Strangely, I’ve never revisited the park. My most recurring contact with it is when my friends and I drive down one of its bordering streets, Peixoto Gomide, at night when we’re traversing Jardins. At this time the park is taken over by young boys, "garotos de programa" waiting for their clients, lonesome dark shapes waiting for a car to stop. And watching the dodginess of the place at night, I have actually laughed out loud at my absurdly nostalgic bent of mind.

I do still walk past Parque Trianon when I’m running errands on Avenida Paulista. In front of the entrance, there is a massive white statue of a bearded man (I used to think it was Dom Pedro), all oversized, muscular legs and arms, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Everytime I walk in front of it I notice the unreal, exaggerated size of the man’s limbs, its huge, thick stone legs practically bursting out of its stone trousers. I now know it isn’t the monarch at all, but a representation of a brave bandeirante, of a kind of 16th century Indiana Jones that seems to have just emerged from the virgin forest behind him. And indeed, the park is all Mata Atlântica, the exotic and over-the-top vegetation that skirts most of Brazil’s coast and that is supposed to hold more biodiversity than the Amazonian jungle itself.

A stone’s throw away from the gigantic stone man, I always encounter another fixture: a small, weathered beggar sitting on the steps leading to the street, a one-armed figure loitering eternally on the corner of the street. His short stump, his beak nose, his lined face, everything imbues him with a kind of tragic Greek aura in my mind. In the hustle-and-bustle of Avenida Paulista, his immobility makes him hyper-real, it makes him look like a veritable apparition.

The less people notice the one-armed man, the more he stands out for me, like all the other miserable people who sit all year round in that relentless serpent of an avenue. I imagine that after a while, all beggars become statues to passersby. They are part of the landscape. In my most glum state of mind, I can also imagine that perhaps no one would notice if a bunch of dirty pigeons sat on their heads and shoulders.

And if I allow myself to linger in the “Greek tragedy” feeling that often assaulted me, during my first months in São Paulo, whenever I walked down Avenida Paulista, the image that rises in my mind is so grotesque I hardly dare to share it: I see the pigeons turning into rapacious vultures, beaking the beggars to death as if they were the city’s offering to the gods. And people continue to walk by, hurriedly.

The Park

I have been hounding this park, I have been hounded by this park. The stillness, the veiled light underneath the trees. The air there is pale green, with stripes, I’m certain. I know it from a dream, I have dreamt of it many times before. I just don’t remember how old the dream is…

Back in October, on my first visit to Brazil, we drove by the park on Alameda Jaú and there was the instant flash, the certainty of déjà-vu. “I’ve been here before, I know this place intimately”. It made sense, it was so near the old apartment where we used to live. I could see myself inside it, being led into its green labyrinth, someone had held my hand and led me inside it. Glossy, dark dark green foliage. I had never seen such dark, petroleum-green leaves anywhere else in my life.

Parque Trianon, somebody told me. Or perhaps I just read a sign the day I finally walked by it. I had never known its name. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t have a name, it need not have a name, its existence was not dependent upon a name. It had always been inside me, nameless, and yet totally real. The park just was. I had forgotten that the park still lived inside me.

A long long time ago, after I’d left it, after I’d stopped going there, it had still pulsated with irregular beats, it had surged forth in my mind’s eye at the strangest moments. But then it had lodged itself deep down inside, just waiting, like a small animal in a cave, for the day when it would be retrieved.

Black and white mosaic paths. I had been delaying the encounter with the park, its dark greenness, the thickness of its canopy, the plants that grew at ground level, below all the trees growing very close together. And then I finally went in, almost apprehensive (will my dream vanish, or will the actual park disintegrate? Only one park can survive, I thought). I knew that I’d been there as a very small child; I must have been two, three, four years old.

I don’t know why I waited so long before visiting it again, even though I’d been living only a few blocks away from it, down by Joaquim Eugenio de Lima. It was only in May, three months after my arrival, that I ventured inside it. Vines wrapping themselves amorously around thick trunks, brown-grey trunks like elephant legs. Stalks with thousands of leaves twisting around the tree trunks, colonizing them. Parasites. Furry green tree trunks. Tall palm trees with their glossy green palm leaves and a jet of brown octopus legs underneath, furry octopus tentacles.

I had been taken down its lanes and its winding paths. In a pram, or holding a giant’s hand. I muttered inside me “I have known this park, I have known this park. I have known this park.” As though if I repeated this mantra over and over again, I could know it again, now.

My park, my dear dear park. You’re mine again.

Day -1, February 2007 (the real arrival?)

Yesterday's writing was about my first day back in Brazil. I described my very first impressions, and rereading the entry, I saw that it almost sounded like a dream. It seemed, how should I put it, unspecific? Like the opening scene of a movie that could have been shot by just anybody, including my favorite and least-favorite directors. Even the style of writing was different from what I'd written before, more like fiction. Perhaps that is the way I remember that morning: vague, white, sharp, cool; imagined. Perhaps the scene is a blueprint, a suspended bubble that captures the feeling of many of my arrivals (or returns). But actually, there is another arrival. The real one, the night before.

My plane landed in São Paulo at the end of the day. Lilian had come to pick me up at the airport. She saw me with my trolley laden with just one suitcase and a carry-on bag, and I remember her look of surprise, as she said something along the lines of "that's it?". Yes, that was it. Only 25 kilos allowed coming from London. I had sent two boxes by plane, and four boxes by ship, and the latter would arrive in Santos only a month later.

We hugged. She suggested that we stop by the little cafeteria. We ordered pão de queijo and I asked for guaraná, that childhood drink, and then she went to the bathroom and I was left alone to contemplate the enormity of what I had just done. I'd left yet another country with the intention of settling in a new one (in this case, an old one too).

Lilian pushed my trolley to the parking lot. The air was cool, night was falling, the trees looked very dark green, and there was a slight breeze. "I think I told you in my last email, I saw F... a couple of weeks ago, at a concert," she said. I waited for her to tell me more about him. She didn't have much to say.

"I'm sorry Nat, but I really think you should forget about him, he's just a moleque." A boy. Yes, I knew that in a way. But knowing that didn't stop me from having feelings for him. It was getting darker, and soon we were entering São Paulo. Traffic was already dense, there was less space between our car and the one ahead. But everything seemed to be happening inside the car, in the hidden heart of the conversation. Peering outside while Lilian talked, I didn't feel like I had just landed in this place. I wasn't sure where I was at all.

Actually, there had been another arrival. Four months before. I'd come on vacation, and I'd stayed at F...'s house. I'd experienced this city where I was born, this first return, through the eyes of the guy that I'd met in London, who had introduced me to yet another Brazil.

I couldn't help but feel a growing gap between my two arrivals, my two returns. He'd come to pick me up at the airport, it had been daytime; and everything had felt fresh and warm and good. I remember most clearly the feeling I got when we started driving along the marginal Pinheiros, when the terrible sewage stench had drifted into the car. It was the end of the day, the sky was turning a curious orange (I would later know that it was the pollution tinging everything with a toxic yet strangely appealing hue). And I remember the incredible skyline on the other side of the river, infinite glass towers stabbing the brazen sky. It was a truly apocalyptic scene, as if we were at the very edge of the world. And just when the smell had gotten overpowering, and I'd started thinking, "this doesn't seem real", he had turned to me and smiled. I'd felt giddy, and the whole happy feeling of being with him had mixed with the feeling of being in Brazil, and the two feelings had melded together until they'd become undistinguishable.

Now, the night had swallowed much of what I'd seen back in October. Now, I saw shadows and outlines of things in the dark, and millions of car lights on the road ahead, stretching as far as the eye could reach. And where I'd seen the jagged skyscrapers clearly outlined against the burnt sky, I now saw millions of square lights, rows and rows of lights suspended in the dark horizon. The car slowed down, seemed just about to stop at the street crossing, and then jerkily sped ahead. Passing the red light, Lilian started explaining that she didn't like to stop for long; the kids just came at you, sometimes juggling, sometimes asking to clean your window. Asking for change. Recently, someone had grabbed her arm and held it tightly down over the rolled-down window, haranguing for money. "Things are different, things are worse now", she said. I didn't know what to think or tell her, and kept quiet.

And I felt flat. I wanted very much not to feel flat, and empty, and unable to focus on anything. I wanted that other feeling back. That high, that feeling of walking into one of your dreams, of walking into a painting you'd seen somewhere a long, long time ago. I wanted the exhilaration back. But this second arrival was not like that. It was what it was. It was real, in a dark and mundane way that the other one hadn't been. Had my other arrival been colored by the rosy-glasses that everyone sings about? I didn't think so. Perhaps it had been that special way because it had been the first time. And the second arrival could never be the same. From the second time onwards, you started comparing with the first one, or the last one, or all of the other ones before. And pronto. The whole process of reminiscing, comparing, trying to fit realities, dreams and memories together had started. Nothing could be more human. Man is the animal that remembers. Ad nauseam.

Day 1, February 2007 (arrival)

I slept a long, deep, dreamless sleep. Then I woke in a narrow, dark room. Outside, a constant rushing sound. I got up and opened the shades, opened the windows. Ten floors below, there was the constant rushing sound of traffic. Across, a solid wall of apartment buildings with its hundreds of windows looking back at me. A feeling of containment, of being surrounded from all sides. Boxed-in.

I ventured out into the hallway. Checked if Lilian was home. No, gone. I took a shower in her white, white bathroom. Dozens of perfume bottles, shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, sunscreen bottles on her wide marble sink. Piles of sunglasses stacked on the shelf above. I dried off in my room, stared at my belongings on the desk. Toiletries bag, books, notebooks, wallet, passport pouch, camera. My whole life contained in these few things.

I walked to the kitchen barefoot, feeling the cool floor beneath. This was new. After months of London winter, a drafty apartment, and a dirty old carpet, my skin touched the elements -air, stone- in a completely different way. My feet on the hard, cool floor and no cold, no cold at all. Wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts, I felt a fresh, new freedom. No layers, nothing swathing your body. Seeing your legs, seeing your pale, pale arms. Seeing your knees, and your ankles, and your toes. Even they looked new, different, almost detached from myself. And there was no cold at all.

The kitchen was large and white-tiled. A bright, bright kitchen, like the one at home in Caracas. Light pouring in. The cold tiled floor beneath my feet. I sat at the kitchen table. There was a newspaper on the table and a basket of bread and a big slab of moist, white cheese in a glass container. I put a pot of water on the stove to boil. No kettle here. I went back to the table, and started reading the newspaper with great hunger.

It was an enormous hunger; I swallowed words whole, gulped down long sentences. I read and read, turned the page and read. A hissing sound came from the stove. I rushed and saw that all the water had evaporated. Just a few drops on the metal surface, slithering back and forth, and the hissing sound. I poured more water in the pot, placed it on the stove again, and went back to the table to read the paper. Ardently, fervently galloping across the pages, savouring and swallowing the words whole. Chuva, alagamento, vôo... This last one a particularly tasty word. Like I was eating the call of a weird prehistoric bird.

Collage number 1

(N.B. This is not my writing. Check source at the end of posting)

"Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity points to the idea of a self as a storied self, as an entity made up of stories told, indeed, entangled in the stories that a person tells or that are told about her. Yet, this very mundane aspect of human beings is also a profoundly enigmatic element (2). This is because, in Ricoeur, the notion of narrative identity is grounded in an ontology deriving from Heidegger’s (1962) emphasis on temporality as the defining characteristic of human beings. The primacy of time in relation to being has to do with the understanding of being as the entity that questions itself as to its way of being.
(...)

Yet a basic aporia of time is its inscrutability. This may well be because we are encompassed by time, as I have just indicated, so that it is impossible to stand outside it. The avenue that Ricoeur follows is to explore the possibility that narrative is the form in which we can overcome the unrepresentability of time (when we think of it in the singular), and the device by which we express the lived, or phenomenal, aspect of the temporality of being. The underlying idea is that the act of telling a story "can transmute natural time into a specifically human time" (1984: 17). In Ricoeur's approach, the term narrative identity seems to join up two problematics of subjectivity: concerning identity, and concerning the relation of history to fiction in the process of the figuration of temporality. The two problematics are correlated by way of the idea that time, and the way it is lived, provides the common ground for their co-articulation (3)."

from "The future of dialogue: Narrative identity, the exchange of memory, and the constitution of new spaces of belonging"
by Couze Venn

DRAFT - NOT FOR QUOTATION
(yes, I didn't respect the author's wish. I'm not sure what laws protect this guy. If it's just a draft, does it mean it doesn't have a copyright yet? Plus, I found it on the internet, by googling something up...)

Day 1, Month: a very dry, polluted holiday month, autumn, Brazil (2008)

My Blog Manifesto regarding writing format (or "what this will look like")

The great thing about a blog is that it allows for an infinite number of structures, forms, and models of writing.

I am hoping that this format will be totally suitable to the fragmentary nature of my writing, that is, that it will offer a solution to my perpetual procrastination, tendency to write random thoughts and descriptions on napkins, receipts and utility bills (all of which are easily lost), inability to finish short stories, intermitant devotion to journal writing, and comfortableness in writing disconnected paragraphs.

I like to tell myself that it is just an "anti-linear thinking" guerrilla tactic, but honestly, sometimes I think it just has to do with the rather unfocused, tired, and slightly unhappy state of mind I've had lately (to be precise, in the last few years)...


*It'd be great if I could just turn my hand to the writing of aphorisms, but even this notion appears to paralyze me. Something along the lines of Adorno's "Minima Moralia", but written by a blond, thirty-something noughties chick who can't seem to settle in any country (or career for that matter). You know, clinically accurate yet hilarious observations on the pros and cons of working in a bookstore versus doing silver dining in a boutique hotel, versus working in show business accompanying insane Mexican pop stars on tour etc.

**I may appear messy (and rather nonchalant about it) to people who look at my room and the inside of my handbag, but really, I'm a total obssessive-compulsive when it comes to organising the inside of my brain.
EXAMPLE: I am a compulsive list-maker ( I make lists of places I've been, shoes and bags bought over one year, men I've spent the night with, favorite people, authors read, things that a guy said to me that would lead me to believe he wants to be my boyfriend, toiletries I'm going to take on my next trip, possible glamorous and artsy careers I would choose had I the talent or were I given a chance, favorite recipes, cities in Asia I've visited, bands I used to listen to when I was 14, etc etc.)

So here's my first list, just so you get cosy with this format...

*******************************************
Types of writing I do:
- I am well-versed in the art of college paper --essay-- writing (lots of sources, quotes, footnotes etc). This is the only type of writing which I seem to have no problem starting and finishing within a short period of time.
-Sorry, let me correct that. I enjoy writing press releases as long as they are culture-related. In this case, my timing is not so bad, since we usually have short deadlines.
- I have written journalistic articles, but, according to my old journalism teacher, I seem to love the research part a little too much.
-I get particular pleasure out of writing reviews. Especially if they're about Japanese writers, Japanese film, Japanese fashion, and so on.
-I used to write good, laborious (but boring) letters to my Oma (my grandmother- my mother's mother). Nowadays I just talk to her on the phone.
-Some emails to ex-lovers and friends overseas can be fairly interesting, and appear to be a mix of travel log, boring rant and once again, journal.
-I've written about a dozen short stories, but none of them are finished. I expect to finish them and turn them into a short-story collection sometime before my sixty-fourth birthday.
-I once wrote poems, perhaps a dozen (pretty good ones if I may say so), but I gave them all to my ex-boyfriend, who never suggested giving them back to me once we broke up. I've thought about contacting him just to ask for them, but really, I'm still procrastinating...
-I've been writing journals (or diaries, if you prefer) since I was 15. There are boxes and boxes of papers and notebooks, most of them stored at my friend Neelam's house in London. I hate not having access to them as the act of rereading them is great for purposes of reminiscing, entertainment, list-making, self-pitying, self-aggrandizement, etc.
- I wrote my high-school graduating speech, and delivered it in such an already nostalgic state of mind, that I started crying half-way through. People in the audience started clapping, and crying as well. I'm sure they thought it was a pre-planned gimmick to make the whole sentimental ceremony even more memorably mushy. Honestly, it hadn't been planned. Same thing happened when I gave a speech at the office for a departing co-worker. As a matter of fact, for me, writing and giving a speech= crying in public. I am just extremely prone to saudades, I think it's in my DNA. (come to think of it, my dad was also one to cry at the drop of a hat at any important occasion involving recollection of a *lost* past).
-... and so on

(Notice I made this list without any numbers, just dashes, thus making it non-hierarchical. There's no meaning to the order in which I cited the types of writing.)

I propose exploring all the types of writing cited above, plus one I haven't mentioned yet: collage. No, this is not a form of plagiarism. I'm just giving myself the license to "cut and paste" a piece of writing I like, that I find relevant, all the while quoting the source. My next entry will be an example of exactly that... All this in the hopes of coming to my concerns, themes, stories, and anxieties from all possible angles.

Why this, voyage-inthedark?

Imagine the first page of a Penguin classic; a rather yellowed page, as the book is a second-hand acquisition.

Black crow's feet, black twigs, black swirls: lots of letters but short words, set in Baskerville Linotype.

They were such simple, short words, but strung together they seemed to hold some immutable truth, like beads of a rosary, which individually are nothing much, but rolled repeatedly between fervent fingers acquire encantatory power. There was such depth of experience and feeling hidden in this chapelet that it felt like the song of a modern oracle.

"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside you was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened, and the way I was happy.(...) "

I read avidly, sipping in each crisp word:

"Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together."

The first time I read these words, they sent shivers down my arms. These are the first lines of "Voyage in the dark", an autobiographical novel written in 1934 by someone that I deeply admire and identify with, Jean Rhys. In these first lines, the character describes her first days in a new country: she distills the experience of culture shock better than any modern theorist could. Probably best known for her novel "Wide Sargasso Sea", Jean Rhys was the prose poet of exile, dislocation, nostalgia and loneliness.

What was this "back there", "out there" that Jean Rhys writes about? It was the other place, the other home: an island in the West Indies. England and the Caribbean. Here and there. There and here. Two dreams, two bubbles that would not merge. And each one was just as real as the other.

Few can describe as well as Jean the sensation of inhabiting several realities at once, of shuttling back and forth between islands, as it were, which is what you may experience when you have lived in several different countries and cultures. As contemporary theory would try to define it: you are cross-cultural, transcultural, international, postnational, postcolonial, global and local at once. You are everywhere and nowhere, you are from here and you are from there.

Emotionally, it takes its toll. Yes, you adapt, you learn the ways, you make this new place yours, and try to hold the old place very close to your chest, lest it slip away. Day after day you are in the new place, living your life in the new place, making it yours.

Still, you get protective about the old place, because as time goes by, you start forgetting about it. Things "over there", people, happenings, memories, it all gets fuzzy around the edges. Perhaps a bit blue-tinted, or pale canary yellow. And when you are suddenly reminded of that place, over there, because of a smell, a song, or the way a woman walks, it comes back to you, like a strong gust of wind throwing a window open. You are plunged in that other life, that other world. Though it is all happening in your head. But really, isn't your life over there continuing, on a parallel line to yours over here? Isn't your life still being lived there --by a phantom self?

Fine, then decide to go back to the old place. And discover that there are actually three realities, three dreams: over here, over there, and the over there that existed in your imagination, the one made up of memories, ghosts, stories that you told yourself about your past. Now try to fit those two over-theres together. Oh no. They don't fit. They do not overlap, not even like a child's tracing of a drawing sitting comfortably on top of the original picture. Those two over-theres are locked away for ever in two compartments of the world; and never the twain shall meet.

My over-there was the place where I was born and which I had left at age thirteen: Brazil. I returned after twenty years of absence. In February 2007, I arrived in São Paulo. This is my voyage in the dark.