I thought of telling my husband what I had done, but, imagining what he would say, I decided against it.
I thought about the boys who robbed us. I had an idea of their lives. A culture of violence, alien and extreme; a world of dark streets, arbitrary punishment and deprivation, gangs, armed children, a kind of steady viscerality. No one offered them help. If they were killed, the police wouldn’t bother to find the killers. Everything around them advertised the low price of their lives. They were ragged, malnourished, they were not physically imposing young men. Even the weapon they used to rob us was cheap and makeshift—there was tape on the handle of the knife. Society didn’t protect them, and so they had no incentive to obey the boundaries society created to protect others. For them, abandonment and freedom were inseparable; by freedom, I mean the freedom they felt to violate the rules others followed. The consequences of being caught robbing us were not significantly worse than the consequences of not robbing us. If they had begged peacefully, if they had asked for charity, we wouldn’t have given them anything.
Unemployment, if nothing else, gives you time to think.
For instance, it is insane to walk down a city street in America and expect the homeless men there not to attack you and rob you.
I wondered if that boy had ever used his knife on a woman whose purse he wanted. It was an enormous blade, more enormous now in memory. The fact that he had taped up the handle only made the threat seem more authentic. I felt a horizon of rage expand within me, long and bright, something like what I imagined my husband was feeling when he spoke of killing the boy who had the knife. The rage was simple, satisfying, and I savored the sensation as it melted out of me like ice.
I couldn’t think of the boys as thieves. Jean Genet was a thief.
Thief —from Old Saxon and Middle Dutch, and a whole gene pool of other dead tongues. I find it difficult to come across a word and not think about its origins. This ends up being debilitating, as you might imagine.
I was out wandering in the neighborhood, waiting for my husband to come home from work, when I was caught in a sudden rain. It was evening. I went into the nearest store, a bookshop; the shelves of blond wood and ordered rows of spines seemed to collect and cast back the warmth of the shop’s lamps. I walked through, in no hurry. There was a café, the fragrance of espresso. I felt better. I was in fiction, then nonfiction, then something else. There was a case of English-language books, out of order and seemingly chosen at random. I liked the inconsiderate chaos of it. I used to be depressed by the thought that you would never read every book that was worth reading—you wouldn’t be able to read even a significant percentage, and much of what you did read would turn out to be dull or unoriginal or simply forgettable. In this light, any bookshop came to seem almost pointless in its abundance; its infinity of print mocked a lifetime’s finiteness. My friend Helen, when I told her this, said she didn’t understand me at all; and later I came to think she was right, that I was worrying about the wrong things. I found a shelf of novels by Clarice Lispector. I’d read something of hers once, in an English translation; harrowing. She was a diplomat’s wife. She and her husband had lived in Naples, Washington, Switzerland. In letters she complained of the cocktail parties. I pulled down one of her books and flipped at random to an interior page. “É como se eu tivesse uma moeda e não soubesse em que país ela vale.” Money is confusing, in other words. Then I went back to the beginning and in my mind’s English read the first sentences: “– – – – – – am searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand.”
I knew other Americans in São Paulo. My husband had some American co-workers, and he knew Americans working at the other banks. Americans sometimes turned up. I overheard English at the cafés on Rua Oscar Freire.
There was a little collective, which privately I referred to as the Wives. We formed a circle because of the language we spoke, the roles we inhabited. We gathered together over time as if by some natural process; every other week I met someone new, and someone else stopped coming. I was once the new person. There were lunches, afternoon drinks; we ordered bottles, sauvignon blanc. I knew diplomats’ wives, the wives of company lawyers. The Mormon wives didn’t drink, but they laughed and gossiped as much as the drinking wives. The women who had children had nannies as well.
I met the Wives at a restaurant that was all windows, no walls; it was a shrine of glass and status anxiety. The point of all that glass was to look. The lunchgoers looked at one another, the passersby on the street looked in at the lunchgoers, and the lunchgoers occasionally looked out to see who was looking in. All that looking was highly contagious. You looked at strangers with more interest than you looked at your companions. It was a palace, a temple of looking.
The Wives had lived in London, Miami, Budapest, Nairobi, Hyderabad, Kuala Lumpur, they had lived all over, moving always because of their husbands’ jobs. They spoke about the boredom of interesting places. We were all of us ancillary. Expatriates had a way of talking selectively about the past. It was a perk of the lifestyle; no one asked for the full story. They talked about the way things were done in other countries, how the roads were, the horror of traffic, what you could buy in the grocery stores.
Karen said that when she learned she and her husband were moving to Brazil, she cried for three days. “But now I love it here. My husband found this bar in Pinheiros, we go and listen to music. You would love it. Brazilian music.” Rachel said, “My greatest fear isn’t growing old. It’s going blind. They’ve done the laser eye surgery twice already, and it keeps wearing off.” Whitney said, “Every time I come here, the prices have gone up.” Alexis mentioned Stanford, a degree in history. “So you and I are roughly equals in unemployability,” she said, addressing me. Vanessa said, “My mother had a great-uncle who lived in Brazil for years, up in the central savanna. He was a rancher, raising cattle. I can’t even imagine.” Lucy said, “There were no wild years for me.” Karen said, “God, I hate São Paulo sometimes.” Whitney said, “Do yours talk about old girlfriends in a way that tells you they still keep in touch?”
Stephanie had lived for a time in Addis Ababa. She talked about the absence of modern technology; her style of complaining was to make a show of not complaining. “I almost never read e-mail, there was no Wi-Fi anywhere. Life without all that was such a revelation,” she said. “I did all this thinking that’s impossible to do anywhere else. Ethiopia is such a spiritual place.”
I went out of the restaurant into bright, post-wine afternoon light. I walked with Alexis and Rachel toward Avenida Paulista. Something was happening there. Traffic was stopped. It was a demonstration of some kind, maybe a few hundred people. Some carried signs. It wasn’t immediately clear what was at stake. I heard chanting, whistles. Rachel asked what it was. “Oh,” Alexis said, “labor grievances or something. They’re like the French here. They’re always on strike.”
Marcos, my husband’s co-worker, had the idea that I should give English lessons, and offered himself up as my first client. I didn’t hear this directly from him; my husband acted as intermediary. “Marcos already speaks English,” I said. My husband responded by pointing out that I would have to be paid in cash. It happened suddenly: I was a tutor of English. A tutor, not a teacher—teachers have relevant degrees.
I streamed some videos whose intended audience was people learning English as a foreign language. I thought that if I saw things from the student’s perspective I would make a better tutor. This led me to a video in which a Finnish teenager “speaks” different languages—that is, she babbles nonsensically while replicating the music and cadence of more than a dozen tongues. She conveys amusement, boredom, anger, sarcasm, and exhaustion without ever using actual words, always convincingly, even in “English.”
