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.