The land and the city

I've been feeling apprehensive about writing here again, because I haven't written in more than three weeks. I haven't known where to start.

During this time away from the blog, I was taken into another reality. I spent two weeks in Switzerland, my (or at least my parents') so-called native country, where I visited friends and family. I stayed in Geneva and Zurich, I went to the lake and to the mountains. I went to the lake and the mountains. This image is crucial...

The two weeks felt like less and more time at once. The quality of the experience affected my sense of time. Time is by no means a stable, defined thing. Time felt different because of where I was. Switzerland acquires a different sheen everytime I go. So the two days I spent in the Engadine mountains, for instance, up in my father's birthplace, had the viscous depth of experience of several weeks.

By the time I got back to Sao Paulo, my state of mind was radically different from the one I had when I left. I really was at a loss, thinking of the blog. A thousand possible beginnings. But as I mulled over where to start, there was a glimmer of hope. An idea hit me. A pinecone detached itself from the tree under which I sat in confusion, as it were. Reader, imagine the scene: watch the pinecone fall from the branch in slow, slow motion, and hit my forehead, and watch me stare at this pinecone in the dewy grass, pondering this new realization. The realization was this: that I should start precisely by exploring the source of my uncomfortableness, by getting to the root of my indecision.

Well, this pinecone, it is a familiar one: I am once again in that weird in-between state. In-between-worlds state of mind. Un pied ici et un pied la-bas.

Here is an image, or rather, the juxtaposition of two scenes, that expresses this weird feeling. I was in Brazil twenty-four hours after being high up in the Swiss alps. Absurd and impossible to process: I was entering Sao Paulo's outskirts in a taxi in heavy traffic, a day after waking up at the heart of a glacier's valley, next to a mountain river that roars, and that flows down with such turbulence that when you peer into it, you only see white, and then bits of very, very milky light green. The river that roars flows next to an old stone house, an eighteenth-century hunter's cabin that belongs to the family, that is a timeless capsule trapped in a mountain valley.

Back there, back in my father's Engadin, I stood on the field in front of the stone house, next to the river, and looked up, and from all sides was surrounded by peaks, brown mountain sides with bursts of green, interspersed among the grey of eroded rock. I stood there and saw the dry dark green of pine trees at the base of the mountains, the brown and grey of the mountain side, the occasional white of snowy peaks, and above a very blue sky with the wispiest of white clouds. 48 hours later I was trapped in a bus on that busy street, Joaquim Floriano, at the heart of smoggy, heartless Itaim, surrounded on all sides by black and silver little boxes, the sound of horns and the roar of buses substituting the roar of the river. Minutes earlier, I had looked at the horizon beyond all the towers of Itaim and Vila Olimpia and Vila Nova Conceiçao, down St Amaro Avenue, I had seen a yellow-beige blending into the light blue of the sky, and the so-called white clouds had actually looked like soiled sheets, yes, like white sheets soiled with urine.

Winter in Sao Paulo: the air is unbearably dry and it has only rained twice in five weeks. Newspresenters daily announce a new state of alert because of the low humidity in the air and the unprecedented levels of pollution. In Veja magazine, I saw an appaling picture of the city, showing a muddled brown-blue sky over the skyscrapers, a truly asfixiating curtain of smog falling upon the city.

Yesterday, on my second day back from Switzerland, from the mountains and the stone house and the river, a man who sat next to me in the bus randomly started a conversation with me, or rather, a monologue. The scene fit perfectly into the movie of my in-between world.

"You know, they say that human beings are rational. But are they really rational?", he wondered.

Oh, I knew what was coming. After all, he had been peering out the window like me, and the same bizarre scenario presented itself to him. The man was middle-aged, wore small wire-rimmed glasses; he looked into my eyes with great intensity.

"Actually man is irrational", he continued. "Why else would such a large chunk of humankind actually choose to live all together, packed in a single spot? Instead of spreading out, everyone insists on being in this one overcrowded spot. Man has traded quality of life for this (he gestured meaningfully towards what lay beyond the window). Consuming, buying... Do we need to have so many cars? How have we come to this, will it never stop?," he said in one breathless burst.

"Fui internado numa UTI, I went into ER with a respiratory problem, turned out I had pneumonia. And mind you, I used to be a marathon runner, I had lungs of steel. This is happening because of the p-o-l-l-u-t-i-o-n that is killing us all. I have seen many young children, and middle-aged people, and old people dying of this, " he said with priest-like fervor. I agreed with everything he said; but I was afraid his speech would turn evangelical soon.

"Why do we buy so much? Why do we have clothes sitting at home when they could be distributed to the poor?" He was right, but I still didn't know if he was just getting things off his chest, or was preparing to hit me for money for some good-cause association inevitably linked to a new unorthodox form of protestantism. "I work for an NGO, Medicos sem fronteira. I am not young, I am 52 years old. It is up to young people to fight against desmatamento in the Amazon, Mato Grosso etc etc etc".

The man spoke in a still and steady voice, but his eyes looked sad and distant and perplexed; I could only nod and let him speak, and wonder wny these strange movie-like scenes always seem to happen to me. "Do you know that land in those states is being bought by foreigners? Massive lots, just disappearing into the hands of foreigners. They buy out local politicians, corrupt politicians, coronels. And they are buying up land and we will have no more control, for who knows what they are doing with this land." He peered deeply into my eyes over his glasses, and held my gaze for a few moments waiting for his words to fully sink in. "Developed countries don't have space anymore, they need to spread, It's a new wave of colonization, and so they are coming here and taking it. And what are we doing about it? What are we doing about it, I ask you?" Despite the slightly paranoid sound to it all, he touched me. Indeed, what was I doing about anything, what could I do about any of this?

But really, when the man in the bus spoke of man's irrationality, really, I started thinking about my own irrationality. How had I willingly parachuted myself into this irrational reality? Indeed, what the hell was I doing in this slow-moving bus caught in traffic like a legless turtle, surrounded by thousands of high-rise buildings...

I got off the bus to go to work, but he had hit a nerve. It wasn't like I wished I were living in Switzerland again, not at all. But I had been thinking of my need for nature, for a stronger connection with the land. I had been thinking about the impact that the land of my father had on me, and how relatively unspoiled it was, and how our family attempted to maintain and conserve some part of the past with the hunter's cabin. And I thought of the cabin's policy of no electricity; the oil lamps, the wooden stove, the lack of toilets and showers, the water that had to be fetched with old iron buckets at a secret water hole, as it always had been in the faraway past.

Meanwhile, the Roseg glacier continues to melt, the snow line rises steadily every year. I am becoming acutely aware of a terrible fear inside. I am becoming conscious of the fragility of it all. I am so afraid that it is all disappearing.

Land used to be an inherent part of your identity. It was part of who you are. Land was passed on from generation to generation. The land linked you to your ancestors. Who you were was linked to your ancestors.

I read in a book by Cees Noteboom, describing the indigenous people of Australia who are living in urban centers: "the Aborigines (...) were like human driftwood- people who had lost their ancestral ties and therefore no longer belonged anywhere."

What happens when you no longer have that relationship to the land, when you are always in transit, unattached to a strip of land? Is it of no surprise that we feel more transient? But still I wonder, do we not always carry, deep inside us, a memory of the land, or lands, that our ancestors came from?

What relationship do I have with the land when I'm in the city? What relationship do I have with this city, this Sao Paulo? It seems sometimes like a place that I just traverse. I am always in transit, on my way somewhere, and then I arrive and go indoors. And hear the roar of the "transito", millions of people moving across the city, their cars inching their way over the tarmac that has been laid over the old swamps of lower Sao Paulo, over streams and rivers that have been forgotten because they are no longer seen. But that still pulsate underground.