My husband worked for a bank in São Paulo, a city that reminded you of what Americans used to think the future would look like—gleaming and decrepit at once. The protests began in late spring, although, this being the Southern Hemisphere, it was really the fall. I was a young wife.
So. We were Americans abroad. We weren’t the doomed travelers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we weren’t the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didn’t have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I don’t think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.
Our tribe was an anxious tribe. This was after Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after Occupy—people were starting to talk about the economic crisis in the past tense, boxing it up in the language of history. The Great Recession. The name was something we needed. I was amazed by how fragile wealthy men seemed in their own eyes. They could be thin-skinned also, mistrustful, myopic, boastful, cowardly, and frequently sanctimonious. Call it the anxiety of late capitalism. I should say that it was my husband who belonged to this tribe. I was ancillary—a word that comes from the Latin for “having the status of a female slave.” That’s the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was “trailing spouse.”
I wasn’t aware until after living there for some time that São Paulo lies almost exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn. The city was a liminal place, not quite tropical, not quite subtropical—really, it was both things at once. This fact, when I discovered it, possessed a kind of explanatory force.
One night we went to the Reserva Cultural to see the new Coen brothers film, about a folksinger in Greenwich Village in the 1960s who fails to become Bob Dylan, and afterward we walked up Avenida Paulista, past the radio antenna that from a distance resembled an ersatz Eiffel Tower, to a restaurant in Consolação. All the magazines liked it, a pretty restaurant on a bad corner. Nearby there were buildings covered with skins of stale graffiti, boarded-up windows, decaying brick, that sort of thing. I saw drug addicts in flagrante delicto. It wasn’t uncommon in São Paulo to find high-end dining in the midst of ruin. The whole thing could have been an art installation about gentrification: High-End Dining in the Midst of Ruin. On the sidewalk I saw the froth of old garbage, blown around by city wind.
Inside the restaurant you were assaulted by tastefulness. The click of ice in a steel shaker, a curl of white staircase. The walls were stacked cubes of smoked glass. My husband said the chef was famous.
“Apparently this used to be a dive bar,” he said. “Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque used to come here.”
“Those are co-workers of yours?”
“No, singers.”
“Oh,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re doing Facts About Brazil again.”
The men wore shirts with open collars. The women wore as little as possible. The bartender, a skinny black tie. The menu bragged of steak tartare, ceviche, gnocchi, gourmet minihamburgers. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a dive bar anymore.
We ate out in São Paulo. Restaurantgoing was the local cult, and we got involved. A home-cooked meal, as a solution to the problem of sustenance, would have set off alarms—who made this? That makes us sound terrible, perhaps, and unable to look after ourselves, but it isn’t an exaggeration.
This was around the time I stopped thinking of New York as back home. I told myself this meant I was officially an expatriate. My husband’s transfer to São Paulo had come about almost entirely because he already spoke some Portuguese—college girlfriend, five semesters. We’d been in São Paulo six months already, and we might stay on for years. The adventure was open-ended. Everything depended on my husband’s job; on variables outside my control, on events that hadn’t happened yet. One of the first words I learned in Portuguese was the term for the fine rain that fell constantly in that city, something between drizzle and mist. I was blonde, slim hips. I liked to wear green clothes. At night the city had an electric chartreuse glow. I saw more dark windows than lighted ones in the concrete faces of apartment towers. I saw Brazilian flags, soccer matches playing endlessly on flat-screen televisions, traffic signals changing at empty intersections.
“So, in this scenario.”
“In this scenario.”
“In this scenario we wouldn’t even be here.”
“Or there would be a nanny. A professional caregiver.”
“I meant we wouldn’t be here in Brazil.”
“People have children in Brazil,” he said.
“But it would be different.”
“It would be different.”
“Because there would be this small creature with us all the time.”
“You remain skeptical.”
I laughed. “In a word,” I said.
The waiter interrupted us to ask, in English, if we were enjoying the meal. When he went away I could see that my husband was annoyed. He felt it was an insult to his Portuguese, since he had used Portuguese earlier with the same waiter. I was sure the waiter only wanted to practice his English. It was perhaps fair to say that both men wanted to show off. “He was being polite,” I said. “I know,” my husband said.
São Paulo was a metropolitan area of twenty-one million people, and always in the throes of something. There were rumors of drought. There were gangland killings, labor strikes. Carjackings. Whole bus yards mysteriously went up in flames a couple of times a year—that was a thing. Criminals used dynamite to blast open A.T.M.s. Drinking water was delivered to our door in twenty-liter plastic jugs, and Brazil was making preparations to host the World Cup. The term of art was megaevent. “We’re not ready,” said the Brazilians I knew. I wondered if you could classify war as a megaevent. São Paulo was a megacity. Information began to accumulate. I was told things. I personally knew only rich Brazilians, because of my husband’s job. But all Brazilians took such delight, perplexing to an American, in criticizing their country; it was a style of critique that managed to deprecate nation and self at once. They would break into spontaneous arias of complaint. Everybody did this—taxi drivers, dentists. The reservoirs were low, politicians were corrupt, the economy was failing. The levels that should have been rising were falling and the levels that should have been falling were rising. Taxes—taxes were high. I read in the newspaper that the police murdered more people than the criminals did. Everything in that city was intimately juxtaposed—favela and high-rise, crack dealer and opera house.
I saw a favela on a souvenir coffee mug before seeing one in person, and recognized instantly that the mosaic of crowded bright rectangles signified the makeshift roofs and walls of poor people’s homes, such an image having become global visual shorthand for the shantytowns of the third world’s developing urban gargantuas. Tourists bought the coffee mugs because apparently there was something heartwarming about aestheticizing squalor. Poverty was colorful. The middle class was
