UFO

I like to move around… the new address is http://www.ufogringa.wordpress.com

Loitering isn’t a word in Portuguese

As calçadas

O inglês tem um verbo curioso, “to loiter”, que quer dizer, mais ou menos, andar devagar ou a esmo, ficar à-toa, zanzar (grande palavra), vagabundear ou simplesmente não transitar. E, nos Estados Unidos (não sei se na Inglaterra também), “loitering” é uma contravenção. Você pode ser preso por “loitering”, ou por estar parado em vez de transitando, numa calçada. O que constitui “loitering” e portanto crime e o que é apenas inocente ausência de movimento ou direção depende, imagino, da interpretação do guarda, ou daquela sutil subjetividade que também define o que é “atitude suspeita”. Mas é difícil pensar em outra coisa que divida mais claramente o mundo anglo-saxão do mundo latino do que o “loitering”, que não tem nem tradução exata em língua românica, que eu saiba. Se “loitering” fosse contravenção na Itália, onde ficar parado na rua para conversar ou apenas para ver os que transitam transitarem é uma tradição tão antiga quanto a sesta, metade da população viveria na cadeia. Na Espanha, toda a população viveria na cadeia.

Talvez a diferença entre a América e a Europa, e a vantagem econômica da América sobre os povos que zanzam, se expliquem pelos conceitos diferentes de calçada: um lugar utilitário por onde se ir (e, claro, voltar) ou um lugar para se estar, de preferência com outros. Os franceses, apesar de latinos, não costumam usar tanto a calçada como sala, não porque tenham se americanizado tanto que adotaram o “loitering” criminalizado para aumentar a produção, mas porque preferem usá-la como café, e estar com os outros sentados. Desperdiça-se tempo mas ganha-se anos de vida, parados numa calçada. 

As grandes cidades brasileiras que perderam o seu centro também perderam o hábito do papo ocioso na rua. A falta de segurança nos transformou em assustados bichos de toca. No nosso uso das calçadas, não somos mais europeus folgados e não somos americanos determinados. Somos fugitivos.

L.F.Verísssimo 

O Mundo é Bárbaro

Mimic

V is S’s mother and bestest girlfriend in the world, the kind my mommy could be if she weren’t a million light years away. Unlike mine, though, S’s progenitress is also a sexy esoteric with a penchant for cosmology.  Her other monumental passion is theater, which I now understand includes circus acts.

Yesterday was V’s birthday celebration. An all girls tea-party, catered with rarities of dish and beverage that the average Brazilian might mistake for alien vocabulary. I ate a rucula and bacon quisch and it just wasn’t from this earth. The crew was composed of about 20 ladies of all sorts of cuts – from farmers’ wives to grannies to sexy, plastic richésses to a yoga guru-cum-psychologist I intend on making my shrink ASAP . Everyone sat about delighting in the fare, smiles and gushes everywhere. Bruno, the only boy available for cheek squeezing and hair ruffling, was quickly sequestered to a safe-zone of X-box adoration by my very own JL. And the only male left in the estrogen filled zone turned out to be a very handsome young man  in suspenders. I’d seen him arrive, and thought kind of odd that he drove a lemon-lime Fiat in a country where a car can be, under no circumstances, a hue other than black, white, gray… or yellow if, and only if, you’re a sports or beach buff.

It was very odd, too, that this handsome person went off into a corner and didn’t come to say hello. Failing to greet even total strangers in a friend’s house is akin to murder in Brazil, and with that caipirinha colored car…well, that was two strikes I couldn’t imagine V allowing in her decorous abode.

But all was resolved when a flap-toed whitefaced thing bounded into the livingroom where we sat reveling one after another, in champagne-spiked strawberry punch, batida, and passion fruit iced tea. 

“I’m a mime, not a mute,” he started off explaining and proceeded to guffaw and cavort in front of the guests. He pranced around and started to get into people’s faces, which I immediately deduced would lead to picking victims out of the room for unwitting participation in his antics. I did my best to avert his gaze, as it seemed that whoever locked eyes with him became part of the show, but it didn’t work and I, too, was pulled in.

And to my horror, and the gall of everything jaded and unfluffy about me, I ended up enjoying myself. I was made a prop in an imaginary house the mime built, along with some five other guests. At first, I couldn’t imagine how V, such a sexy thing, would be into the mimery circuit, but then I realized that theater isn’t so far off from it and that is her big thing. She was nearly dying of laughter and the tears of joy that streamed down her face made her tanned skin shiny with rivulets. It was sweet to see an adulty-adult like her turn into a child in an almost literal sense. That, and liking theater are some of the interesting things Brazil has made me learn in recent days.

Later, S tried to pick up the mime, but it turned out he was married with children.

Wax and Wane

Her name is Mara and she cooks honey in a vat that she stirs with a popsicle stick. The cauldrony thing bubbles and sends a hallucinatory aroma of sweet bees and pollinated groves into the air. The room is small. It’s really just an ante-room, a foyer kind of place where people whom you don’t want to let further into your house can stop for a visit.  A sitting room. Only the name doesn’t suit it. The metal windows that scrape against the frames as she opens them, the scuffed up tile floor, and the pre-modern television with a turn-knob for changing the channels, they all cancel the idea of such a formal name for the place where I’ll get my girl parts waxed.

—-

And Mara. “Mara’s awesome,” S. declares as we drive her new Volkswagen around town. We just bought perfectly necessary sachets of poutporri and hand creme at L’Occitane and Lush, respectively. A middle class American is the consumerist equivalent of an upper crust Brazilian, so, S and I match just right. “I’ve been going to Mara since I was twelve,” she says. “The best in town.”

—-

We drive up and park in front of a Seventh Day Adventist congregation. It’s mid-afternoon orations hour. Mara’s salon is an unmarked driveway with a rain-stained sheet of printer paper taped to the grate: “Dear Clients, please be informed that pedicure and manicure services are temporarily unavailable. Cordially yours…” No name signed. The wind swoops through the bars as a short boxy grandma in a moo-moo opens the garage for us. “How are you Mara?” S exclaims and they give each other the rudimentary kiss on the cheek and crinkled smile.  Well, better a grandma than some gossipy salon maven who might spread jealous rumors about town regarding my lady lair.

—-

In the foyer-cum-waxing salon I am invited to sit on the crochet-covered sofa as S. hoists herself up onto a creaky gurney, reasonably cozied up with pillows and flower adorned sheets. The cauldron of honey is already bubbling and Mara is immediately busy spreading it onto S.’s bikini line. I didn’t even see her take her pants off! The TV is busy broadcasting a daytime talk show – “Casos de familia.”  The mom today is anguished over her son’s decision to wear make up even though he’s NOT GAY, he insisits. I see S’s big toe twitch and a loud “krshhhhh” emits from her bikini line. Isn’t that a movie torture scene trick, when they don’t want to show the blood and gore outright? I’m very nervous now and of course, it isn’t even over, in fact, my turn is yet to come. S lifts her head from the gurney and whispers, “I think you might wanna avert your eyes now,” as Mara flips S’s leg up into the air and digs in with the popsicle stick to spread the honey where the sun don’t shine. In the five years I’ve been living on-and-off in Brazil, this was the first time I truly understood what they meant by a Brazilian wax, and no, thank you… I choose the American one.

—-

People are people; they’ll always be different, similar, precocious, mercurial, outgoing, shy, etc. Above all, differences will sometimes rub against each other, and create a bit of friction.

The maid made me cry!

First of all, let me just fess up – I have a maid. I’m not gonna launch into the sociological underpinnings of Brazilian society to justify just how it is that I can afford this luxury, though. I’m just gonna lay out the facts.

She’s been burning my clothes on the iron and mixing lights and darks to the effect of everything having a light speckling of lint, or “ferpas” (I like that word, don’t ask me why!). I’m pretty sure it’s part of her job NOT to do that to the laundry, and anyway, the only person I complained to about it was my mami-in-law. Then, I took it upon myself to separate my clothes from the general pile and wash them myself on the weekends, when the maid wasn’t around to question it.

I was doing just fine with this system, thinking it would solve the problem with the minimum amount of trouble for everyone. I am, obviously, not Brazilian.

I woke up today to the Monday morning whirl of Fernanda (that’s her name) running the washing machine. As usual, I took JL’s laundry, which he doesn’t seem to care about ruining, down for her to wash. I did this even before digging the sleepy crusties out of my eyesockets. This is when Fernanda chose to strike.

“I HEARD,” she said with a slight yo-sistah twang, “that you don’t think I do my job right, and you don’t want me touching your clothes anymore.”

“Huh?” my eyecrusties and I piped up timidly over the whirl of the machine.

“Do you not wash your own clothes nowadays?” she queried, jury style.

“Yes, ma’am,” a voice inside my head squeaked, but what came out was just another, “Huh?”

“Well, then, you can wash your own clothes,” she said, understanding my grunting as a cowardly way of fessing up.

If it had been in English, I would’ve defended myself, despite the sleepiness. I would’ve told her that she ought not to be a bitch and recognize the fact that I was trying to be nice and just take care of it myself. So what if I told JL’s mom… and by the way, I didn’t even remember that. It’s not like I’d told anyone else and what would she have me do, call her on it? demand money for the ruined items? be a confrontational bag like she’d just finished being?

But here in Brazil, I’m slow on the uptake. I just ran to my room and started to cry. I couldn’t even articulate what had happend or why I was so unnerved by something so boring and unimportant. It wasn’t my slow response (though it did irritate me to be such a ninnie ). What I was really shaken by was that the way she said it, made it seem like someone  had ratted me out, like I’d been gossiped on by my here-to-fore lovely in-law. A little while later JL’s mother defended herself, saying she’d mentioned my name as absentminded support for a general argument she’d been having with Fernanda. She was slashing, burning, discoloring, and ripping everyone’s stuff and it had to stop. “I didn’t mean to get you in the middle,” mami-in-law declared, nearly crying herself. But I learned something new that I’d keep to myself, this time-

No matter how sweet your mother-in-law, you still need to watch out.

Left fork, Right fork

When I was little, I started to use both my hands for things. Like every kid, I was figuring out if I was right handed or left handed. My grandmother, on the other hand, thought this was the mark of the devil. She was also in the practice of spitting on twins and detesting albinos. So, she started slapping me on the wrist, and when that failed, tied my left hand to a chair. “Wtf?” I asked my mom (in Polish, of course).

She told me the story of how my aunt Lucy, who actually is lefthanded, showed up home from school one day crying and spitting up snot balls. Her teacher, a Communist by revolution but a Catholic and Slav by birth, told her she was cursed for the use of the hand that was meant for #2 work. He told her that she was effectively eating shit every time she clutched her fork or spoon on the wrong side of the Borscht plate. From that day on, I think she developed a tortured relationship with food, because she dried up like a prune and only showed a healthy apetite in pre-1st grade photos.

Here in Brazil, you can tell who’s from repressed old Europe (or North America), and who isn’t. By watching the cutlery, you can also tell who’s trying to be Euro. Those clutching the fork in the left hand belong to the home team. Those swinging from la derecha are playing an away game.

It is a mystery to me where the switch got flipped or why. Just like it’s a mystery why some countries use a wedding ring on the right and others on the left. Perhaps this also has something to do with wiping up one’s behind? I might get my answer from an etiquete expert. Does anyone know of one alive nowadays?

Alleluja

Walking around tonight. The purpose – train the overly fat labrador to walk obediently upon the sleepy streets of small town Brazil. It was a task that led us through lots of twists and turns of the corner, and yet not very far from each place where we stopped to let the dog sniff around, there was a church. Or a big airplane hanger with God inside, is what I’d say to describe it.

At one point, we reached a square that was neatly ringed with delapitated cars, but that were, nevertheless, obviously just parked, not abandoned, like the rusting and falling carroseries might suggest. The owners were nearby. But where?

Two churches. Not one. Battling it out, staring each other down, with tinted Byzantine-ish windows (but not TOO Byzantine, so as not to confuse with the Catholic Church that greedily hogs the founding square at the center of town.) 

“How do they choose?” I imagined it could only be an innie-minnie-miney-mo process. In everything I could see through the poorly lit streetlamps – yellow walls, painted windows, slanted terra cotta rooves, and wide girths – the churches were exactly alike.

Those two churches, huge, imposing, glaring down at each other from across the little square, where the motorized  testaments to the poverty of their patrons parked, were filled to the brim with importance and something that I could clearly hear was the throat of their God grumbling, “In here, heathen! Mwahahahah.”

The people inside stirred about, to and fro. The women wore skirts below the knee and long, long hair they never cut. I thought hair was for strength, so, Samson…sure…But why do the Delilah’s need so much?

And there’s more. 

All their milling about was underpinned by a slow, visual scanningthat they all seemed to have adopted simultaneously. It’s like they couldn’t really pay attention to God. They had to look every which way about… or was He lost? Why were they so on edge? so profoundly paranoid? Back and forth, the faithful walked about. 

I rounded the corner, as the dog tugged the cord twisted around my arm, and I thought I saw a quick glance from a woman with a burberry skirt and bunched up sweater. I looked back at her, but, apparently infected with the shyness or paranoia or whatever it was… a furtive glance is all I could muster. I realized I, too, have been looking for God in the shadows and corners, cause, for a while now, He hasn’t been hanging out at the altar, like the contract between church and flock would have.

What if feels like to be far from home

Living abroad, it’s easy to feel disconnected from what’s going on in your place back home. I feel like my umbillical chord is somewhere, tethered to an empty womb that’s fallen ill with abandonment. I have waking dreams of my hometown and of Brooklyn, the last place I lived. Little tumbleweeds of melancholy memory roll through me in the shape of sad, electric currents of familiarity that’s been discarded. I can’t help but feel like I wasn’t done living in New York and re-connecting with childhood Philly. 

Is that something everyone feels, when they’ve moved abroad? I’ve met a million people who’ve “moved” for a year. They always knew they’d come back. I never met someone who stayed away, like I’m supposed to. 

Life here, in Brazil, isn’t hard for a foreigner. Or at least, for me, it isn’t. I haven’t much to complain about… except that I miss home so much! It’s like a spirit has lodged itself within me and taken over what was to be a fun, delicious sub-tropical life, one I’d tasted before, after all! I knew what was here, waiting for me. I liked what lay before me; I had no illusions. I just didn’t expect that the United States would turn out to have a psychic grip on me, a sense of unfinished business, of having abandoned something. 

Maybe it’s my loyal nature. I can’t give up on things, people, experiences. And of course, I’ve done just that by moving abroad. I haven’t turned my back on 20 years of my life, but my waking dreams the feeling of sadness that spreads through me like a virus sure make it seem like I have.

Sushi Wooshi

I’m a sushi popper and I need to admit it. There are things that one ought to keep quiet. Things like multiple sock days and missed flossings, and of course, should you be a 1970’s era suburban mom with a pill problem, you know where your skeletons ought to be stored. But sushi. I can’t lie. One after another, the sweet seaweed and its contents fly into my mouth. They’ve got little wings or springy backsides or whatever else…All I know is, they end up swooshing down my esophagus at velocities well above safety levels. There’s got to be a hazard hidden in how much I love raw fish wrapped in rice and dipped in salty soy sauce.