So far, living in Liberdade has been exquisite.
My day starts when trucks and buses thundering down the road pull me from my dreams and from the mountain of pillows under which I´ve burried my head, or rather, under which I´ve burrowed a tunnel.
If it´s a windy day, my shutters are invariably pushed open by a strong draft, revealing a gorgeous, sublime view of grey and pink highrises, and a shifty sky. The windows are incredibly low, and there are no glass panes. The raw edges of that rectangular hole in the wall have a certain renaissance charm, the edge of the white plaster melding into the rough wood that makes that hole remain rectangular.
I can lie there in bed contemplating the jagged urban horizon. Or I can walk to the window and stare down at the empty carp ponds and the rocks and trees in the Japanese garden, and survey the people making their way down busy Avenida Liberdade, and taste the quality of the air, and try to ascertain if the slight wetness in the air, that silvery taste to it, points to coming rain...
.........................
This is the top of the city. This is a high and windy and clear place, it is where the Jesuits settled, close to where the Indian village was. It´s steps away from the Catedral da Sé, and its palm trees and its Marco Zero, the navel of the city. This is a place where the earliest workers came to live, and the slaves, and where there were public hangings, and where the lowest layer of society was buried in cemeteries that still exist hidden away in dark alleys between shops that sell overpriced ricecookers and lovely ricepaper lampshades.
And it is a place with a very small but very real church across from the subway station, where people light candles they´ve bought from the shop next to the church, a shop that handles every kind of religious paraphernalia, ranging from simple saints candles to white porcelain buddhas and beads and wide wooden trays and plates to accomodate food offerings to candomblé gods.
-------------------------------------
Each important point is starting to position itself in my mind map of the place. Today I found somewhere to drop off my dirty clothes, a lavanderia with very high, colonial ceilings and industrial ironing stations. I don´t have a washing machine yet. There is, of course, the rooftoop of my building with eight washstands and clothes lines and a view of Sao Paulo´s grey spiked skyline. But it was crucial to identify this necessary service provider in my busy single professional (yuppie?)life. The fiftyish Japanese woman takes my pile of clothes, weighs it on an old iron scale. Then she writes down every single item I´ve brought on her invoice: two jeans; purple striped t-shirt; lilac shirt; "abóbora" T-shirt. Pumpkin T-shirt? It´s my old yellow H & M t-shirt. I marvel at the poetry of this woman. Beyond her precision, is her unique mnemonic device, the personal array of color names to choose from. Liberdade is poetic.
The previous weekend I was taken to the local market, hidden away in a marginal street. Varieties of lettuce and ruccula and caqui (is it a fruit or a vegetable), very cheap trays of peppers or cucumbers. A gigantic fish stand. It is a Japanese community, there is no end to the seafood consumed in this area. By the end of the market, around two in the afternoon, there are thick flies swerving around the piles of fish that include Amazonian varieties, like pirarucu and tambaqui, echoes of a Brazil so far and so different from my labyrinthine old streets.
This is my new entrance point into Brazil. This tiny point in the map will be start of my attempt to deepen my relationship with place.
sexta-feira, 27 de março de 2009
quinta-feira, 26 de março de 2009
The husk of things
There is a recurring time of the month when things seem to harden. The day appears to have a metallic edge to it. The view from my window is more two-dimensional, it loses its depth. Everything seems to lose its depth. And every detail of reality seems very far away from me, as if I were looking at my surroundings through binoculars. It´s as if I were watching a film, or unrolling a roll of negatives.
Or, sometimes it feels as if I were traversing the day hanging on to the walls of my reality. Someone I know had a brain infection, which causes her to frequently lose her balance: she walks, but needs to steady herself with her two hands on the wall. When the dizziness strikes, she quickly grips the wall. She looks focused and confused at the same time. Her eyes go vacant, she is concentrating so hard. She seems only intent on putting one foot after the other, and all that is occuring around her seems to recede into an irrelevant dimension. One step, and then another. One-two, one-two... She is an image of myself in one of those depth-less days.
This happens to me more frequently than I would like to admit. Too many of my days are spent trying to survive them. When I am trying to survive them instead of live them, is when I start to focus on extreme details to narrate the day to myself as it happens. That is when I pay too much attention to: the subtle hues of a polluted sky, an elderly woman´s varicose veins, the types of mustard on display at the supermarket, the seven different smells of organic shampoos at the drugstore. I gasp and try to grip the aesthetic as one would reach out for a buoy in the midst of a dark, undefined turbulent sea.
I think that when I cannot penetrate into the depth of life and fall into its mystery blindly, confidently, because of fear, because of a recurring anxiety, I let myself be drawn into its surface. I observe, and register, compulsively, objects, things that populate the world. I catalogue everything: foods, shopfronts, what people are wearing. And pretty soon this obsession with the visual, the things, the objects, becomes an compulsive need to buy, or to possess, part of the world. Or it becomes a need to describe, to define and to label. It´s an addiction to THINGS, and to ascribing my own unique meaning to them. It´s my own personal type of fetishism.
Where does this come from, or what is it about? It´s feeling only the husk of things. A casca da coisa. La peau des choses. Feeling outside them, or touching their boundaries. Where their inside ceases to be, where the outside begins. I grasp, and hang on to their form instead of their content. It´s a survival mechanism.
The other aspect of this process is the comparisons between things that I constantly need to make. I have started to become more aware of how much I compare people and objects from different times of my life. I compare this apartment to another one in Geneva. This landscape to that one. This experience to that one. This person to that one.
Why do I do this? Because of the lack of continuity to anything in my life. Except for my very early childhood, I have never stayed in any one place more than five years. I need to find a thread that links the present me to the past me. But the markers, the signs get scrambled, or go missing sometimes.
I create connections, I don´t just see, but construct relationships between seemingly unrelated things in order to make sense out of disorder, out of chaos. This is why I look at a physical structure, a building, a house, a street in Brazil, and compare it to another one I know in another country. I am building real-life metaphors. The Liberdade bridge = the rail-bridge behind Jonction in Geneva. The loudness of traffic outside my Brazilian apartment = the unbearable loudness of traffic in Stoke Newington, London. This last one is a particularly relevant image. Because it describes the relationship between inside and outside using the image of home. I distinctly remember the physical discomfort of sleeping in a bedroom assaulted by so much street noise that it was as if the room were in the middle of the street. It´s a leaking of sound from one field of being to another. A dripping of sound from the public to the private, from the world to the person, from the them into the I. This loudness outside invading the quiet inside now has a very real and physical and aesthetic expression in my mind now: the street/the room.
It´s as if I can only make sense of life and experience by expressing thoughts through metaphors that use the visual structure of the world. I need objects to express Me, place to express identity.
These comparisons, these similes, these metaphors: they are also desperate acts of translation. They express the need to connect different realities, to connect-the-dots, to find a path between two, three or more islands of experience. They are islands because they have distinct place and time boundaries. But as we know, no translation is ever equivalent. Something of the meaning or context is lost. There are no real equivalences. These are just strategies to interpret the chaos, and therefore strategies for survival.
The problem is that I don´t want to stay on the surface of things anymore. I don´t want to experience them the way we look at a beautiful starry sky: from a distance, with much admiration, but from a distance. I want to penetrate things. I want to feel their depth. I want to stay with them long enough to know them more than just aesthetically, or for cataloguing or comparison purposes. I want to fall so deep into them that they become new and unique, a new marker, a new sign, a new reference, instead of an image, a copy, a translation of something I already know.
Or, sometimes it feels as if I were traversing the day hanging on to the walls of my reality. Someone I know had a brain infection, which causes her to frequently lose her balance: she walks, but needs to steady herself with her two hands on the wall. When the dizziness strikes, she quickly grips the wall. She looks focused and confused at the same time. Her eyes go vacant, she is concentrating so hard. She seems only intent on putting one foot after the other, and all that is occuring around her seems to recede into an irrelevant dimension. One step, and then another. One-two, one-two... She is an image of myself in one of those depth-less days.
This happens to me more frequently than I would like to admit. Too many of my days are spent trying to survive them. When I am trying to survive them instead of live them, is when I start to focus on extreme details to narrate the day to myself as it happens. That is when I pay too much attention to: the subtle hues of a polluted sky, an elderly woman´s varicose veins, the types of mustard on display at the supermarket, the seven different smells of organic shampoos at the drugstore. I gasp and try to grip the aesthetic as one would reach out for a buoy in the midst of a dark, undefined turbulent sea.
I think that when I cannot penetrate into the depth of life and fall into its mystery blindly, confidently, because of fear, because of a recurring anxiety, I let myself be drawn into its surface. I observe, and register, compulsively, objects, things that populate the world. I catalogue everything: foods, shopfronts, what people are wearing. And pretty soon this obsession with the visual, the things, the objects, becomes an compulsive need to buy, or to possess, part of the world. Or it becomes a need to describe, to define and to label. It´s an addiction to THINGS, and to ascribing my own unique meaning to them. It´s my own personal type of fetishism.
Where does this come from, or what is it about? It´s feeling only the husk of things. A casca da coisa. La peau des choses. Feeling outside them, or touching their boundaries. Where their inside ceases to be, where the outside begins. I grasp, and hang on to their form instead of their content. It´s a survival mechanism.
The other aspect of this process is the comparisons between things that I constantly need to make. I have started to become more aware of how much I compare people and objects from different times of my life. I compare this apartment to another one in Geneva. This landscape to that one. This experience to that one. This person to that one.
Why do I do this? Because of the lack of continuity to anything in my life. Except for my very early childhood, I have never stayed in any one place more than five years. I need to find a thread that links the present me to the past me. But the markers, the signs get scrambled, or go missing sometimes.
I create connections, I don´t just see, but construct relationships between seemingly unrelated things in order to make sense out of disorder, out of chaos. This is why I look at a physical structure, a building, a house, a street in Brazil, and compare it to another one I know in another country. I am building real-life metaphors. The Liberdade bridge = the rail-bridge behind Jonction in Geneva. The loudness of traffic outside my Brazilian apartment = the unbearable loudness of traffic in Stoke Newington, London. This last one is a particularly relevant image. Because it describes the relationship between inside and outside using the image of home. I distinctly remember the physical discomfort of sleeping in a bedroom assaulted by so much street noise that it was as if the room were in the middle of the street. It´s a leaking of sound from one field of being to another. A dripping of sound from the public to the private, from the world to the person, from the them into the I. This loudness outside invading the quiet inside now has a very real and physical and aesthetic expression in my mind now: the street/the room.
It´s as if I can only make sense of life and experience by expressing thoughts through metaphors that use the visual structure of the world. I need objects to express Me, place to express identity.
These comparisons, these similes, these metaphors: they are also desperate acts of translation. They express the need to connect different realities, to connect-the-dots, to find a path between two, three or more islands of experience. They are islands because they have distinct place and time boundaries. But as we know, no translation is ever equivalent. Something of the meaning or context is lost. There are no real equivalences. These are just strategies to interpret the chaos, and therefore strategies for survival.
The problem is that I don´t want to stay on the surface of things anymore. I don´t want to experience them the way we look at a beautiful starry sky: from a distance, with much admiration, but from a distance. I want to penetrate things. I want to feel their depth. I want to stay with them long enough to know them more than just aesthetically, or for cataloguing or comparison purposes. I want to fall so deep into them that they become new and unique, a new marker, a new sign, a new reference, instead of an image, a copy, a translation of something I already know.
quarta-feira, 25 de março de 2009
Back to the kitchen
To my great desperation, my apartment is still kitchen-less. I am forced to eat in local restaurants or buy sandwiches and fruit from the supermarket. The reason for this extremely expensive yet enjoyable state of affairs is that my high-end designer kitchen will only be delivered in about three weeks. I may be living in a scruffy working-class neighborhood, but my culinary obssession is bound to reveal my bourgeois roots. More and more often, I picture myself preparing meals for myself and for friends in my unbearably modern, minimalist(yet minuscule) kitchen, an open-plan 1.80m by 1.50m kitchen. I´m basically dreaming of a capsule that is all white cabinets and black granite worktop and hidden aluminum handles.
Is it because I´m secretly a bon-vivant woman or a gourmet cook? I don´t know. But ever since I moved, I´ve gotten increasingly excited about all the food I´m going to buy and store and cook and consume in my space-age kitchen. By moving to Liberdade, I have willingly and masochistically exposed myself to a myriad of Oriental grocery stores. I say masochistically because I´ll never earn the pots of cash I need to truly empty out those shelves laden with aesthetically-pleasing products. All that curious packaging covered with Japanese characters, all those unique color combinations, all that green and pink and red!
The more obvious things to stock up on in the Japanese shops would be various types of Asian ingredients and vegetables such as fresh tofu, udon noodles, pak choi, Chinese broccoli, shiitake mushrooms, rice vinegar, frozen dumplings (or gyoza as they´re more commonly known here), fresh herbs like coriander (otherwise known as cilantro/coentro etc), and exotic drinks like aloe vera juice.
But this weekend I had a truly orgiastic experience walking into the Chinese food shop for a change. Of course, I was delighted with the endless rows of oyster sauce, roasted sesame oil, dark and light soy sauce, five-spice powder, hot sichuan pepper, canned bamboo shoots and baby corn, and let´s not forget, dried herb mixes for extremely bizarre "health" soups.
But, oh la la! I discovered a Thai section, if one may call it that way. I have really been missing my New York and Geneva days of Thai yumminess. My friend Karla´s timeless Tom Khaa soup immediately springs to mind. How many times have I escaped Geneva´s drab winter weather, or its headache-inducing freezing "bise" wind, to be greeted by Karla´s colorful Dutch kitchen with a fuming bowl of this wonder? How I miss the tanginess of the lemongrass, the sharp green fragrance of the coriander, the sweetness of the coconut milk, the tingle of the red chillies, the meat-softness of the mushrooms, the crunchiness of the unshelled shrimp!
In this very messy and very loud Chinese shop (quite different from the sedate and organised Japanese one) I found all the much-beloved ingredients necessary for a Thai fiesta. Red and green curry. All the coconut milk, galangal and Thai fish sauce I could ever wish for. I really miss the freshness and zest of Thai cuisine. I only know of two Thai restaurants in São Paulo, and they are both beautiful and expensive. So I think the best place to have Thai food will be my kitchen indeed. The fact that I have no dining table or sofa should only add to the Southeast Asian atmosphere that I plan to install in my home. Everybody on the floor! I think my lack of windows at the moment also has the potential of adding a rather simple, tropical yet tasteful feel to my future Thai get-togethers.
But my brand-new culinary journey doesn't end here. In my school´s new neighbourhood, I discovered a whole new food front: European food. When I went in today to explore the "Vila Nova Conceição Emporium", I started feeling as if I were returning to my old life in Geneva.
In the Emporium, there is a gigantic wine section that is suitably cellar-dark. It stocks all the Côtes du Rhône, Bourgogne, Rioja and Tempranillo I could ever want for my future "wine and cheese" get-togethers. As for the cheese... Alright, the gruyère is displayed at room temperature, and has strangely darkish-yellow edges. Not a good sign. But there is a huge refrigerated section entirely devoted to gouda and other Dutchy cheeses. Loads of goat cheese as well...
As for the accompaniments -- tapas, starters or what have you: there is not one, but FIVE brands of dijon mustard. A fresh-olives bar. Reasonably priced smoked salmon. Organic vegetables galore. And, this is key, there is a middle-eastern food display with dried nuts, huge glass jars of vine leaves, tahine, and spices shipped from Lebanon. The translation work on the labels is astounding: I discovered that turmeric is actually saffron (turmeric= açafrão). Which is precisely the ingredient that was missing for my all-Thai shelf in my future kitchen. But as for all those spices, I just need a teacher to help me delve into the whole new world of Arabic food. I´m waiting.
Is it because I´m secretly a bon-vivant woman or a gourmet cook? I don´t know. But ever since I moved, I´ve gotten increasingly excited about all the food I´m going to buy and store and cook and consume in my space-age kitchen. By moving to Liberdade, I have willingly and masochistically exposed myself to a myriad of Oriental grocery stores. I say masochistically because I´ll never earn the pots of cash I need to truly empty out those shelves laden with aesthetically-pleasing products. All that curious packaging covered with Japanese characters, all those unique color combinations, all that green and pink and red!
The more obvious things to stock up on in the Japanese shops would be various types of Asian ingredients and vegetables such as fresh tofu, udon noodles, pak choi, Chinese broccoli, shiitake mushrooms, rice vinegar, frozen dumplings (or gyoza as they´re more commonly known here), fresh herbs like coriander (otherwise known as cilantro/coentro etc), and exotic drinks like aloe vera juice.
But this weekend I had a truly orgiastic experience walking into the Chinese food shop for a change. Of course, I was delighted with the endless rows of oyster sauce, roasted sesame oil, dark and light soy sauce, five-spice powder, hot sichuan pepper, canned bamboo shoots and baby corn, and let´s not forget, dried herb mixes for extremely bizarre "health" soups.
But, oh la la! I discovered a Thai section, if one may call it that way. I have really been missing my New York and Geneva days of Thai yumminess. My friend Karla´s timeless Tom Khaa soup immediately springs to mind. How many times have I escaped Geneva´s drab winter weather, or its headache-inducing freezing "bise" wind, to be greeted by Karla´s colorful Dutch kitchen with a fuming bowl of this wonder? How I miss the tanginess of the lemongrass, the sharp green fragrance of the coriander, the sweetness of the coconut milk, the tingle of the red chillies, the meat-softness of the mushrooms, the crunchiness of the unshelled shrimp!
In this very messy and very loud Chinese shop (quite different from the sedate and organised Japanese one) I found all the much-beloved ingredients necessary for a Thai fiesta. Red and green curry. All the coconut milk, galangal and Thai fish sauce I could ever wish for. I really miss the freshness and zest of Thai cuisine. I only know of two Thai restaurants in São Paulo, and they are both beautiful and expensive. So I think the best place to have Thai food will be my kitchen indeed. The fact that I have no dining table or sofa should only add to the Southeast Asian atmosphere that I plan to install in my home. Everybody on the floor! I think my lack of windows at the moment also has the potential of adding a rather simple, tropical yet tasteful feel to my future Thai get-togethers.
But my brand-new culinary journey doesn't end here. In my school´s new neighbourhood, I discovered a whole new food front: European food. When I went in today to explore the "Vila Nova Conceição Emporium", I started feeling as if I were returning to my old life in Geneva.
In the Emporium, there is a gigantic wine section that is suitably cellar-dark. It stocks all the Côtes du Rhône, Bourgogne, Rioja and Tempranillo I could ever want for my future "wine and cheese" get-togethers. As for the cheese... Alright, the gruyère is displayed at room temperature, and has strangely darkish-yellow edges. Not a good sign. But there is a huge refrigerated section entirely devoted to gouda and other Dutchy cheeses. Loads of goat cheese as well...
As for the accompaniments -- tapas, starters or what have you: there is not one, but FIVE brands of dijon mustard. A fresh-olives bar. Reasonably priced smoked salmon. Organic vegetables galore. And, this is key, there is a middle-eastern food display with dried nuts, huge glass jars of vine leaves, tahine, and spices shipped from Lebanon. The translation work on the labels is astounding: I discovered that turmeric is actually saffron (turmeric= açafrão). Which is precisely the ingredient that was missing for my all-Thai shelf in my future kitchen. But as for all those spices, I just need a teacher to help me delve into the whole new world of Arabic food. I´m waiting.
segunda-feira, 23 de março de 2009
Things I didn´t know
So something that I didn´t know when I bought my dungeon apartment (that´s how it feels sometimes, up at the top of the sanatorium) is that there is some shady business going on in the building right across the street. Well, how else can I explain the white truck that backs into the dark back entrance in a very tight 90 degree-angle, every night around 11 o´clock, with much roaring, trucky sound, such loud, loud roaring and spitting that it interrupts any kind of thought I may be trying to have. And then this midnight white horse reappears mysteriously, sometimes at several other odd hours of the night (like 1 or 2 am). What exactly is deposited or loaded onto that iconic white truck?
At first I thought it was obviously the rubbish and refuse produced by the gigantic 300-people-seating Japanese restaurant next door. Then I concluded that there was no reason to load the truck with garbage SEVERAL times each night. So now I think that there is a little factory in the hidden guts of that 50s grey building, there is presumably some kind of merchandise that gets loaded and sent somewhere else in the country. The weird thing is that one cannot help but think of sweat shops, as this is the oriental quarter, isn´t it? I´ve been thinking this but it´s absurd, of course there are no sweatshops around here... Do people come all the way from China just to work packed like sardines in a Brazilian Niemeyer basement?
Lately, the night has been marked by even stranger sounds. Saturday and Sunday, in the dead of the night (like 3.30 in the morning), somebody started messing about with the pavement. It´s that distinctly familiar sound of somebody clawing at the sidewalk stone tiles with a hammer or something. I´d think somebody was indeed repairing a faulty sidewalk if it weren´t for the terribly late hour. The only thing that occured to me was that some (possibly homeless) lunatic was getting his frustrations out (I even pictured him trying to bury a dead body). I don´t know why, I couldn´t rid myself of the image of a Beckett-like clown-beggar, hammering the sidewalk on his knees with a huge tool, endlessly, waiting, waiting, waiting for something...
There are actually a couple of town crazies around here. I saw one on the day I moved in. I had just come out of a sushi restaurant with the kind friends who had transported my many boxes. First this twitching, nervous, trembling man asked for money. I mistook him for an alcoholic beggar, and feeling generous, gave him a few coins. Within a few moments, this Japanese man sporting dress pants, a buttoned-up shirt and a dirty American cap, started stopping the cars in the street, but instead of sticking his hand out for coins, he was holding his two hands together in the shape of a pistol. Then he leaped into the middle of a street crossing, right in the middle of the bustling midnight traffic, and held everyone at gunpoint with his imaginary gun. Then he went truly crazy in authentic Japanese yakuza movie style, and started spinning round and round, crazed eyes bulging out, his mouth sputtering machine-gun sounds... I´ve seen him out and about since, in a pretty calm state actually, entering the famed shady building and genuflexing devoutly to the God trapped in his 50s highrise shrine, I presume. And the guy is really a neighborhood fixture, I´ve seen bar waiters greeting him with a jolly handwave.
But anyway, back to those midnight sounds. There is definitely a midnight marauder around, who aside from hammering the sidewalk has also started scraping some ground and laying cement (or so I imagine because of the sounds, but I´m usually so dog-tired that I dare not rise and walk to the window to observe the sinister goings-on across the street). But I think that this little construction activity is also occuring somewhere in the vicinity of the suspicious building.
Also, I should mention that a little dog has started randomly yapping in the middle of the night too, a desperate yap coming from the street it seems. Perhaps a companion to the sidewalk-clawing looney?
Of course, I haven´t mentioned yet the distant chants reverberating from the hidden karaoke in the building next to my neighbouring Chinese hotel. I heard a very faint (and very poor) rendition of a U2 song the other night. Usually it´s Japaneses pop, so Japanese I cannot recognize a single note.
Soon I will start writing about the SMELLS I didn´t know about when I bought the apartment.
At first I thought it was obviously the rubbish and refuse produced by the gigantic 300-people-seating Japanese restaurant next door. Then I concluded that there was no reason to load the truck with garbage SEVERAL times each night. So now I think that there is a little factory in the hidden guts of that 50s grey building, there is presumably some kind of merchandise that gets loaded and sent somewhere else in the country. The weird thing is that one cannot help but think of sweat shops, as this is the oriental quarter, isn´t it? I´ve been thinking this but it´s absurd, of course there are no sweatshops around here... Do people come all the way from China just to work packed like sardines in a Brazilian Niemeyer basement?
Lately, the night has been marked by even stranger sounds. Saturday and Sunday, in the dead of the night (like 3.30 in the morning), somebody started messing about with the pavement. It´s that distinctly familiar sound of somebody clawing at the sidewalk stone tiles with a hammer or something. I´d think somebody was indeed repairing a faulty sidewalk if it weren´t for the terribly late hour. The only thing that occured to me was that some (possibly homeless) lunatic was getting his frustrations out (I even pictured him trying to bury a dead body). I don´t know why, I couldn´t rid myself of the image of a Beckett-like clown-beggar, hammering the sidewalk on his knees with a huge tool, endlessly, waiting, waiting, waiting for something...
There are actually a couple of town crazies around here. I saw one on the day I moved in. I had just come out of a sushi restaurant with the kind friends who had transported my many boxes. First this twitching, nervous, trembling man asked for money. I mistook him for an alcoholic beggar, and feeling generous, gave him a few coins. Within a few moments, this Japanese man sporting dress pants, a buttoned-up shirt and a dirty American cap, started stopping the cars in the street, but instead of sticking his hand out for coins, he was holding his two hands together in the shape of a pistol. Then he leaped into the middle of a street crossing, right in the middle of the bustling midnight traffic, and held everyone at gunpoint with his imaginary gun. Then he went truly crazy in authentic Japanese yakuza movie style, and started spinning round and round, crazed eyes bulging out, his mouth sputtering machine-gun sounds... I´ve seen him out and about since, in a pretty calm state actually, entering the famed shady building and genuflexing devoutly to the God trapped in his 50s highrise shrine, I presume. And the guy is really a neighborhood fixture, I´ve seen bar waiters greeting him with a jolly handwave.
But anyway, back to those midnight sounds. There is definitely a midnight marauder around, who aside from hammering the sidewalk has also started scraping some ground and laying cement (or so I imagine because of the sounds, but I´m usually so dog-tired that I dare not rise and walk to the window to observe the sinister goings-on across the street). But I think that this little construction activity is also occuring somewhere in the vicinity of the suspicious building.
Also, I should mention that a little dog has started randomly yapping in the middle of the night too, a desperate yap coming from the street it seems. Perhaps a companion to the sidewalk-clawing looney?
Of course, I haven´t mentioned yet the distant chants reverberating from the hidden karaoke in the building next to my neighbouring Chinese hotel. I heard a very faint (and very poor) rendition of a U2 song the other night. Usually it´s Japaneses pop, so Japanese I cannot recognize a single note.
Soon I will start writing about the SMELLS I didn´t know about when I bought the apartment.
domingo, 8 de março de 2009
A white white place
Every move provokes anxiety. I mean, quite literally, that every change of place, whether country, city or room, generates an empty feeling inside me, a kind of dark, deep well that is slowly and terrifyingly flooded with contradictory emotions. It always has the potential of becoming a pleasant, enjoyable anxiety. It is an anxiety that sits at the very bottom of my self and shapes my world continuously. It is is the anxiety of the new. It is an anxiety that I seek feverishly, that is pleasure and pain. An anxiety the absence of which leads to tedium, an itchy feeling inside.
I should know. According to my latest count, I have moved 24 times in my life, from the moment I was born til now. I´m not counting 3-month hotel stays, long summer camp holidays, backpacking hostels and lonely temporary rented rooms. I´m talking about homes. 24 places with my own bed, closet overcrowded with clothes and shoes and bags, kitchen with my favorite absurdly exotic food.
So the difference now, the marker, is that I OWN the place where I live. And I don't know how much the flutter in my breast, and the slight lack of air in my lungs, is related to this ownership. I bought a one-bedroom apartment in Liberdade, Japantown in Sao Paulo. I had been looking for a flat for weeks, and was disappointed with all my visits. Then one day, when I was walking out of a music venue after a mildly satisfying samba concert, I looked up and saw what would be my future home. I knew immediately. I trust my intuition infinitely more than I trust my extremely logical reason. It was a hospital-looking building, almost a sanatorium; it appeared to belong to another place, another time: the familiarity of European lines. The six-floor cream building reminded me of Paris, Geneva. Run-down proletariat housing in a vaguely French place, a vaguely French São Paulo, if that were possible. This 1930s building stood out clearly against a dark, dark sky, illuminating the night. And it sat in the middle of a poorly-looked-after Japanese garden, with Japanese street lamps, Japanese cedars and a Japanese rock garden, and Japanese carp ponds drained of water and carps.
The rest was quick. I went back to the place the following Sunday and talked to the doorman. By chance, there happened to be an apartment for sale. No, not by chance. I had known, somehow. An apartment on the last floor, looking over the city, watching over the old, decrepit center of town. This was five months ago. The space became a pile of rubble before it could actually become the very white and airy home it is now. Four months of remodelling. And still, after all the work, the walls are curvy, the walls look pregnant. The plaster guy may have been an amateur, or not. No matter, I am stuck with beautiful, tall, white, not-straight walls.
(As an aside, I would like, just for once, for someone to actually try to imagine what it´s like to be on a perpetual pilgrimage, always seeking to stay put in one place, yet always hearing the call of the sirens, the call from other shores or other voices, the blinking of distant lighthouses beckoning me to a place that will more intimately root me to my own self. Strangely, practically everyone I have most cared about has been a whole lot more sedentary than I have. Yes, opposites attract. Someone will appear, someone will help me find the ground I need to root myself to. Someone will explain my self-imposed exile to me, someone will make all my previous flights very evidently point to this one final resting point).
So, the anxiety became clear to me when I realized, lying on my bed today peering out at the silver skyline and blue sky outside my window, that this apartment was exactly like the one I had when I lived alone in Geneva. The bedroom had the exact same dimensions. It was the same rectangle, I had put the bed and the dresser in the same exact spots. There was an equally warm wooden floor. And huge, huge windows looking out on a similarly sublime view. In Geneva, it was the meeting of the two rivers, the greenish Rhône and the much whiter Arve, joining into one flood of water that passed through the huge arches of a rail bridge. From my Geneva window I saw the river and its forrested banks, and the white-peaked Jura mountains behind which the sun set gloriously. And from my São Paulo window, I had an urban spectacle: 60s highrises and dilapidated office buildings, and in the distance an Empire-State-looking tower with a flag flapping in the wind. And even the arches were there, the coral red arches of the viaduto across from the big Radial Leste, arches that were lit up at night like some industrial, 3rd world Arc de Triomphe.
All the apartments I´ve lived in have looked very similar. But now the ressemblance struck me dumb, filled me with a sensation of deja-vu, of return, of repetition that made me, for a few moments, lose track of where I was and when I was. And the crazy thing was that I was starting to feel a bit like the self I was back then, seven or eight years ago. I was that self and the present one, and all the other ones in between, at the same time. I remembered the satisfaction of my loneliness, the intimacy of my losses. I peered at the objects on my dresser, the grey vase with pink painted flowers that my grandmother had given me, the porcelain bowl my nona had given me, and also the red and gold matchbox with a silver Franc nestled inside; and the white candle-holder my musician boyfriend had given me. All these reminders of my nomad childhood and adolescence and adulthood.
I savoured the memories of my readings in bed, the poetry and the Nabokov, the Perec and the Woolf. I tasted the sleepless, burning nights with the men I had loved or simply desired. And I recalled the sleepless nights, empty, white white nights after my father had died. And this is when I struck that hard little pebble inside, that small white rock lodged forever between my ribs, that discomfort that returns no matter where I am. It is the little terrible stone of my biggest loss, the one that came as if to punctuate the long, endless series of smaller losses. The one that came to confirm that all those things that had been abandoned and left behind merely existed to prepare me, in minuscule increments, for the only loss that really mattered. That cruel white white stone.
I should know. According to my latest count, I have moved 24 times in my life, from the moment I was born til now. I´m not counting 3-month hotel stays, long summer camp holidays, backpacking hostels and lonely temporary rented rooms. I´m talking about homes. 24 places with my own bed, closet overcrowded with clothes and shoes and bags, kitchen with my favorite absurdly exotic food.
So the difference now, the marker, is that I OWN the place where I live. And I don't know how much the flutter in my breast, and the slight lack of air in my lungs, is related to this ownership. I bought a one-bedroom apartment in Liberdade, Japantown in Sao Paulo. I had been looking for a flat for weeks, and was disappointed with all my visits. Then one day, when I was walking out of a music venue after a mildly satisfying samba concert, I looked up and saw what would be my future home. I knew immediately. I trust my intuition infinitely more than I trust my extremely logical reason. It was a hospital-looking building, almost a sanatorium; it appeared to belong to another place, another time: the familiarity of European lines. The six-floor cream building reminded me of Paris, Geneva. Run-down proletariat housing in a vaguely French place, a vaguely French São Paulo, if that were possible. This 1930s building stood out clearly against a dark, dark sky, illuminating the night. And it sat in the middle of a poorly-looked-after Japanese garden, with Japanese street lamps, Japanese cedars and a Japanese rock garden, and Japanese carp ponds drained of water and carps.
The rest was quick. I went back to the place the following Sunday and talked to the doorman. By chance, there happened to be an apartment for sale. No, not by chance. I had known, somehow. An apartment on the last floor, looking over the city, watching over the old, decrepit center of town. This was five months ago. The space became a pile of rubble before it could actually become the very white and airy home it is now. Four months of remodelling. And still, after all the work, the walls are curvy, the walls look pregnant. The plaster guy may have been an amateur, or not. No matter, I am stuck with beautiful, tall, white, not-straight walls.
(As an aside, I would like, just for once, for someone to actually try to imagine what it´s like to be on a perpetual pilgrimage, always seeking to stay put in one place, yet always hearing the call of the sirens, the call from other shores or other voices, the blinking of distant lighthouses beckoning me to a place that will more intimately root me to my own self. Strangely, practically everyone I have most cared about has been a whole lot more sedentary than I have. Yes, opposites attract. Someone will appear, someone will help me find the ground I need to root myself to. Someone will explain my self-imposed exile to me, someone will make all my previous flights very evidently point to this one final resting point).
So, the anxiety became clear to me when I realized, lying on my bed today peering out at the silver skyline and blue sky outside my window, that this apartment was exactly like the one I had when I lived alone in Geneva. The bedroom had the exact same dimensions. It was the same rectangle, I had put the bed and the dresser in the same exact spots. There was an equally warm wooden floor. And huge, huge windows looking out on a similarly sublime view. In Geneva, it was the meeting of the two rivers, the greenish Rhône and the much whiter Arve, joining into one flood of water that passed through the huge arches of a rail bridge. From my Geneva window I saw the river and its forrested banks, and the white-peaked Jura mountains behind which the sun set gloriously. And from my São Paulo window, I had an urban spectacle: 60s highrises and dilapidated office buildings, and in the distance an Empire-State-looking tower with a flag flapping in the wind. And even the arches were there, the coral red arches of the viaduto across from the big Radial Leste, arches that were lit up at night like some industrial, 3rd world Arc de Triomphe.
All the apartments I´ve lived in have looked very similar. But now the ressemblance struck me dumb, filled me with a sensation of deja-vu, of return, of repetition that made me, for a few moments, lose track of where I was and when I was. And the crazy thing was that I was starting to feel a bit like the self I was back then, seven or eight years ago. I was that self and the present one, and all the other ones in between, at the same time. I remembered the satisfaction of my loneliness, the intimacy of my losses. I peered at the objects on my dresser, the grey vase with pink painted flowers that my grandmother had given me, the porcelain bowl my nona had given me, and also the red and gold matchbox with a silver Franc nestled inside; and the white candle-holder my musician boyfriend had given me. All these reminders of my nomad childhood and adolescence and adulthood.
I savoured the memories of my readings in bed, the poetry and the Nabokov, the Perec and the Woolf. I tasted the sleepless, burning nights with the men I had loved or simply desired. And I recalled the sleepless nights, empty, white white nights after my father had died. And this is when I struck that hard little pebble inside, that small white rock lodged forever between my ribs, that discomfort that returns no matter where I am. It is the little terrible stone of my biggest loss, the one that came as if to punctuate the long, endless series of smaller losses. The one that came to confirm that all those things that had been abandoned and left behind merely existed to prepare me, in minuscule increments, for the only loss that really mattered. That cruel white white stone.
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