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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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