Letter from Paradise. 2008.

October 2008.
Because I had been too tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too frightened of hangovers and failure and the days getting shorter, I was sent, a badly behaved twenty five year old child, to Brazil, where winter does not come and no one fails and the median age is twenty three. There I could become a new woman, there with the American construction workers on million dollar a year incentive trips, there with the Italian divorcees and the splurging secretaries and the girls in string bikinis and the boys constantly in search of something, children who were totally unconcerned regarding the economy of buying a motorbike or a surfboard for thirty American dollars, (fifteen Brazilian reais down and ten dollars, five reais, a week and then abandoning it; children who may or may have not been told, as I was told, that golden children all must, as chimney sweepers, face the dust. I was to lie beneath the same sun that had kept Astrud Gilberto and Brigitte Bardot forever hopeful. I was to play at sipping caiphirinas and wear flowers in my hair as if five years had never happened. I was to see for myself that just beyond the end of the line lay not “Despond” but secret islands of raw earthen clay and happy people without alcohol problems.

I went to Brazil as a dreamy visitor and have now since, come to bear a scary, wary resemblance of a person I didn’t want to emerge from the equator as, which has remained since my returning to the States. Simply put, I do not believe that the stories told by folklore or capoieria merit extensive study. I have never heard a Portuguese phrase, including and perhaps most particularly “beleza”, which accurately expressed anything I had to say. I have neither enough capacity for surprise nor enough heart for twice-told tales of unrequited love (Girl from Ipanema) or tedious vignettes (100 Years of Solitude) and the surprising lovely sight of prostitutes in muumuus. And so, now that it is on the line between us that for some reason I had lost a quite reasonable amount of temperament for paradise, real or not, I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely how and why Brazil moves me, touches me, saddens and troubles and engages my imagination, my spirit and faith in people, what it is in the southern hemispheric air that will linger long after I have forgotten the smell of passion fruit and lime and the way the palms sound in the trade winds and what rainy mornings eventually would turn to look like after my first day of my first day of teaching job and everything in between.


February 2008.

The 9:45 p.m. Continental flight to Sao Paulo this evening was delayed two hours before take off from the airport in Houston. During the delay, the flight attendants served Coca-Cola and peanuts and two children played tag in the aisles and, somewhere behind me, a man began screaming at a woman who seemed to be his wife. I say that the woman seemed to be his wife only because the tone in of his invective voice sounded practiced, as though it were somewhat of a routine. Although the only words I heard clearly were these: “You are driving me to murder”. After a moment I was aware of the door to the plane being opened a few rows ahead of me, and of the man rushing off. At that time, there were quite a few flight attendants (Continental employees?) rushing on and off then, and considerable confusion even from my Ambianic state. The post-9/11 world, as we were living as travelers, had changed a great deal, and this commotion made me order a bourbon cocktail. I do not know whether the man ever re-boarded the plane before take off or whether the woman came to Brazil alone, but I thought about it while I was drinking that bourbon cocktail and I thought about it during breakfast the next morning, when I had emerged from my interrupted sleep, and I was still thinking about it when the first sight of the anticipated country appeared off of the left wing tip.
It was not until we were approaching Sao Paulo and were descending low over the city, minutes before landing, when I realized what I disliked most about all of this as an incident. I disliked it because of the couple. Because every aspect of a short story, one of those “little epiphany” stories in which the main character glimpses a crisis of a stranger’s life – a woman weeping in the powder room, or perhaps a tear room at a swank hotel, someone walking away from a lover, or an accident seen from the window of a train, “tear rooms” and “trains” still being fixtures of short stories although not of real life – and is moved to see his or her own life in a different light. I was not going to Brazil because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Brazil because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I want room for fresh flowers and emotions and people who may or may not be driving one another to murder but in any case are not provoked, by the demands of narrative conventions to say so out loud on the 9:45 p.m. flight from Houston to Sao Paulo.




Work in progress.

Brasil: A Traveler’s Guide.

I.
This time tomorrow,
I will be a woman of Brasil.

II.

I am
going
to
visit
Bahia.

III.

My fingers graze
the cold plastic walls.

A motionless aeroplane
goes shrieking over the bay of Mexico
and down to America Sol.

The captain has turned on the FASTEN SEATBELT sign.

"I can see the world and it ain't so big at all".


Brazil will be waking now.

We fall desperately into Sao Paulo.

VII.

who I am doesn’t matter
as you see me
fighting to survive.

fighting to be esteemed and honored
(so that my past vanishes)
you will dismiss me as nothing terrific

Fair enough
but there is one thing about me:
I can take you to Salvador.


VIII.

Now although I hate to travel
I go to a lot of places

and have noted

a certain recurrent phenomena.
A journey, for example,
begins with a voice

calling out your name
behind you.
This seems a convenient arrangement.

How else would you know it’s time to go?
On the other hand,
who is it?

And what do they want?
So too a friendship
begins before the first meeting,

love
before the first conquest.

maybe
the people of Salvador
can explain
some of this to me.