Mapping: la petite ville dans la grande ville

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...

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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.

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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.