The Call of the Street

The street had been grey, grey... Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, but always grey. But no, I am lying. The city was often bursting with color, with emotion that projected straight out of the concrete and came flying through the streets to grip my heart. I had been miserable many a time in Sao Paulo, but the markings on its streets, the drawings and letters and wild universes that encroached on its blind walls, these were always lifting me up. As I sat in buses, as I navigated endless, traffic-infested streets, these otherworldly visions pulled at me, came looking for me, calling at me like sirens.

And so I started to photograph these streets, first in my mind, then with a camera. When I found myself trapped in the chaotic soullessness of the place, I began to notice the symbols, the repetitions of patterns and colors. I grew affectionate towards certain street corners, underpasses, tunnels and blind alleys. What had been meaningless, a never-ending sea of blunt, ugly structures, an undefined wreck of postmodern times, a doomed babylon of souls caught in shiny metal boxes, this disturbing Sao Paulo grew to be more human, more playful, more approachable, and quite frankly, more livable.

It was these markings, these codes that built a different map of the city for me. I could edit out the monstrosities, or rather, put them side by side with the comforting signs of a human presence: graffiti. Graphs, markings of the souls that inhabited the monster. Pixaçao. Letters, leftovers of a heart beating inside the city. Emotion breathing out from the interstices of the stone walls.

Walk to the subway

Before the bridge, the little herbs stand. A wooden shack upholstered with rosemary, chamomile, basil. Also, long green rubbery tongues, dark green tongues edged with spikes: aloe. A dark face peeking out of the window in the middle of the herb forest. A rectangular garden, an eternal plant rack, suspended above the multiple lanes, the infinite rows of cars, the flashing metal. A furry green scaffolding etched out against the city´s widest horizon. The eye reaches farther, down the valley, all the way to the high towers of Zona Leste, and still, there is a sky behind it.

The green baby

I looked at the objects on top of my dresser this morning.

I looked at the photographs and the porcelain bowl and the gilded jewelry box. I looked at the coral red stone egg, trying once more to recall where I had found it, or who had given it to me. And then I saw, next to the egg, my pale green seed, a bean-shaped thing that I had first mistaken for a stone when I found it in the sand.

It is the only organic thing on my display. It looks like a very big, milky, pistachio-colored kidney bean.

I was walking at the beach on a dark, cloudy day when purple-black clouds seemed to fill the entire sky behind the sea. I was looking at this sky so full of swirls, a sky that took up three quarters of my field of vision, a sky that seemed about to swallow the rest of everything. And then, I looked down at my feet. Amongst the seaweed and the broken pink shells, hidden in the coarse dark sand, I saw this smooth green shape. I really thought it was a strange rock, but my friends told me it was a seed.

I kept the seed, it was so beautiful. I forgot it was a seed, and it became part of my collection of objects in my room, my things that I carry with me everywhere I go. But today it changed itself. I caught it. I peered at it for longer than usual. A bright green shoot had come out of its side. A very tiny bulbous outburst. It almost looks like the birth of a cactus. It is no more than a centimeter long, and it´s divided into two little knuckles.

Somehow it has managed to be alive, lost amongst my hard, inanimate things. I did not nurture it, I did not give it anything to live. It must have absorbed moisture from the air. It must have drunk from the microscopic water particles in the wind, the draft that penetrates through the slats of my closed blinds. So here is a magnificent outcome of my having no windows. The weather has turned lately, it has been raining torrentially, and all that wet air has found its way into my apartment, and has created a minuscule finger of life in my bedroom.

It occured to me that I could plant the green bean, that I could provide an appropriate environment for it to grow. But I have no idea what its normal habitat is. I am afraid of killing it. I found it in the sand, a hard and dry shape. I transported it to my bedroom and nestled it among dead wood and stone and fabric. And now it´s growing out of air. I may just leave it be, and see what happens. My green baby.

Fridays with Sylvia

Every Friday afternoon, B. and I read "The Bell Jar" at her house. To get there, I take the subway, and then the bus towards Moema, and then it´s a fifteen-minute walk up a quiet, leafy street. The trees are enormous and their leaves are viscous and dark green. Their oversized roots break the cement and colonize the sidewalk. When I ring the bell at the large brick house, the heavy front door opens with an automatic twitch; I am greeted by a big orange dog with silky hair and moist brown eyes. Then B. appears, barefoot, wearing a plain black t-shirt and jeans, her long, glossy brown hair pulled back in a loose bun. She takes me into the dim living room, I ask for a glass of water, or a coke if I need caffeine, and we sit at the dining table.

B. is seventeen. She needs to keep up her English while she prepares for the vestibular, the exam every teen needs to take to get into university. In the preparatory course, the cursinho, she is made to read countless articles in English about current affairs and economics, and she has to write down dozens of vocabulary words, and work through pages and pages of multiple choice questions.

I want to find a way of motivating her, to help her find a taste, if not a passion, for English. She is exhausted by her endless studying, she doesn't exercise anymore, she barely has a social life. This strong, pretty girl, shut in her house as in a mausoleum, kept away from life. We talk about it. This whole hamster-in-a-wheel situation is only supposed to last for a few months, until she takes the exam, and gets into university, and starts her new life. Which will be all about studying again. But no matter, she says, university life is IT, that is the end point. These months of no-life, they are the means to an end. I decide not to tell her that once she is in college, she will feel like that it, too, is transitory, she will be working towards another end again. And so it will always be, endlessly. But I keep these musings to myself.

She has never heard of Sylvia Plath. I bring her my old, tattered copy of "The Bell Jar", with its brown-gold cover with a dark red rose. I read it for the first time when I was her age, and then read it again during my holidays at the beach in Venezuela this past December. The book spoke to me, more than ever, and I hope it will speak to her too.

........................

We started a few weeks ago. The reading is excruciatingly slow: we read out loud, taking turns. We stop and savour the images, describe a character, discuss American culture in the 50s. She only reads ten pages between my visits, but remembers the last reading together in detail. We go over the beginning again, trying to decipher something more in it.

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they eletrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

I start talking about the Rosenberg execution. I talk about the Cold War and McCarthyism and the electric chair, and later on I will try to help B. trace a parallel with the electric shocks that the main character, Esther, undergoes to "cure" her of her madness, an extreme medical procedure (short of a lobotomy) that is supposed to tame a young girl´s suffering. We follow a string of Esther´s associations with that summer in New York, and soon I have to explain to B. the word "cadaver", and then explain what it means that the cadaver´s head became something that was carried around on a string, like some "black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar."

These are strong, real, extreme images. They are scary ones, which have none of the saccharine lightness and frivolity of TV shows like OC and Gossip Girls. And I know pretty fast that this read will be a journey, that English has found a new way of creeping into B.´s life unawares, as a series of words that are not what they should be, but are a comparison or an image of something else, always.

................................

In the book, Esther, who is really Sylvia Plath, is spending the summer working at a women´s magazine (presumably Vogue) alongside eleven other girls. It is a special privilege for smart, overachieving girls, an opportunity to enter the glowing "real life" in New York City, and an opportunity for Esther to show off her writing, albeit in a rather conventional, mundane format.

The girls are lodged in a young ladies´ hotel called Amazon. B. has no idea what an amazon might be besides a river in Brazil. I tell her that an amazon is a woman who cuts off one of her breasts in order to shoot better. I´m not quite sure how and why I come up with this minimalist, graphic explanation of the word. B. is fascinated and horrified at the same time. We wonder whether amazons, who are supposedly more apt to shoot with an intrinsic part of themselves missing, use their bow and arrow to hunt or to play at war. I recall the jingoist feel to the word, and decide that amazons are really warriors.

I make B. summarize what we have read so far, I ask her to tell me what we know of Esther, to talk about how Esther feels in New York. We look for passages that will better express this, lines that anchor Esther´s emotions to the physical world.

There is the heat of summer, and Sylvia´s recurring descriptions of the New York concrete sidewalk. The sidewalk outside hotels and cabs and magazine events, the hot city sidewalk that is so new to Esther, the sidewalk that is always fuming, registering the encounter of heat and moistness and grey, hard matter. When it rains, Esther imagines it must be like the rain in Brazil, the way the fat rain drops hiss when they hit the ground. B. and I stop at this paragraph. I explain the onomatopeia of the hisssssss. And then, another image. This is a sidewalk from which vapors are always "writhing" (I tell B. that usually it is people that writhe, but I cannot go very far with this, as it occurs to me that it is usually lost souls that writhe, in hell).

We have only read three chapters, but we are already immersed in Sylvia's language, in her web of imagery. The book is still fresh in my mind, and the reencounter with its metaphors is all the more delectable when shared with someone else.

We read about Esther´s forray into the pine-pannelled bachelor pad of a dj who dresses like a cowboy, with a plaid shirt and cowboy boots and leather belt. B. laughs about Lenny. We read about Doreen, Esther´s beautiful yet cynical friend. We laugh when we read that Doreen´s breasts "had popped out of her dress and were swinging out like full brown melons as she circled belly-down on Lenny’s shoulder". B. laughs and laughs, and I am so glad that she is slowly hooking on to the book, that she is reacting to it the way that I did, last Christmas, and over sixteen years ago.

B. reads that Doreen is like an exotic white bird, and I make B. find the passage that describes Doreen´s hair as a big white puff of cotton candy. B. doesn´t know "cottoncandy", I have to tell her that cotton candy is that big sweet thing that is sold in Parque Ibirapuera, and she gets me immediately. I realize that as a child I never tasted cotton candy, I only saw it being sold at that park, and now Doreen´s hair in Sylvia Plath´s book is forever bound to a memory of something forbidden in my childhood, something that always remained an image rather than a taste.

We laugh some more when Esther is at a fancy luncheon where fingerbowls are used (I explain what a fingerbowl is), and Esther recalls her first encounter with a fingerbowl, how she drank the fragrant water inside the fingerbowl, with cherry blossoms and all, thinking it was a clear soup.

We talk about how deep Sylvia is, and yet how funny. "This is real", says B. Yes, she says that "this is real for a lot of people". She thinks it's much better, much more important than "Catcher in the Rye". She gets the language, she gets the experience.

We read that when Sylvia brings a linen napkin to her lips, her lipgloss leaves a stain that "blooms like a heart". I show her with my hands the movement of a flower opening, a flower blossoming. "She is always making comparisons between things", says B. "I mean, she is always using... what do you call it? ... metaphors about things. And then they always remind her of other things, of her past." I am really excited. B. has plunged. B. will be different after reading this. And I, too, am a little different after our Friday read.

I see the thread that images provide in the telling of a story, how they help connect disparate things. I think about how Sylvia is going to help me tell my story.

I go online and fish for quick study notes and interpretations of the book. I find this in "Sparknotes". Why is it that this passage speaks to me so much, why doesn't it feel outdated, why does it seem desperately relevant to my own life, here, now 2009 in Brazil?
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from Sparknotes:

"The Restricted Role of Women in 1950s America

Esther's sense of alienation from the world around her comes from the expectations placed upon her as a young woman living in 1950s America. Esther feels pulled between her desire to write and the pressure she feels to settle down and start a family. While Esther's intellectual talents earn her prizes, scholarships, and respect, many people assume that she most wants to become a wife and mother. The girls at her college mock her studiousness and only show her respect when she begins dating a handsome and well-liked boy. Her relationship with Buddy earns her mother's approval, and everyone expects Esther to marry him. Buddy assumes that Esther will drop her poetic ambitions as soon as she becomes a mother, and Esther also assumes that she cannot be both mother and poet.

Esther longs to have adventures that society denies her, particularly sexual adventures. She decides to reject Buddy for good when she realizes he represents a sexual double standard. He has an affair with a waitress while dating Esther, but expects Esther to remain a virgin until she marries him. Esther understands her first sexual experience as a crucial step toward independence and adulthood, but she seeks this experience not for her own pleasure but rather to relieve herself of her burdensome virginity. Esther feels anxiety about her future because she can see only mutually exclusive choices: virgin or whore, submissive married woman or successful but lonely career woman. She dreams of a larger life, but the stress even of dreaming such a thing worsens her madness."

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...

.........................


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.

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.

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.