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.

---------------------------------------------------

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.

------------------------------


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?

--------------------------------

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."

-----------------------------------------------

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.