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 said to be “emerging”: a moving target. As soon as you get a bit of money, the things you once tolerated become intolerable.
When wealthy Brazilians left the country on vacation, they didn’t visit museums, or do anything cultural, as far as I could tell. They shopped. They shopped for clothes and perfume, for smartphones, for children’s toys.
In New York, I’d had a job in the public relations department of a multinational cement company. I wrote content for the company’s Facebook page and Twitter feed—a cement company with a Twitter feed. It paid as well as you would imagine. My husband used to suggest I do a master’s. He couldn’t say in what. I was twenty-five years old on the day of our wedding, an age when the future still seemed to shape itself willingly around whatever decisions I made. “With your degree,” said my unmarried friends—who were most of my friends—as if marriage somehow precluded the rest of life. But that degree wasn’t doing much for me. And I loved my husband. Something hadn’t jelled for me after college, professionally, and because I married early, because my husband made money, I was able to get away with it. “A woman without a job actually is like a fish without a bicycle,” as a friend of mine put it. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” I said. “Well, you have to imagine the fish looking really sad about not having the bicycle,” my friend said.
And so the prospect of living abroad initially had a primal, precognitive appeal—Brazil! I wrote the country’s name on A.T.M. receipts, cocktail napkins, Con Ed bills. We talked about what I could do there. It seemed like a chance to press the reset button. My husband, with the idea that I might write a blog, made the case that life in a foreign country automatically conferred interest. “You have the right sense of humor for that kind of thing,” he said. “And we could always have a kid,” he said.
We made love the night before leaving America and then lay in bed, at the hotel the bank was paying for, sharing a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and adding up all the relocation expenses the bank was also paying