Once upon a time I had the idea of doing translation work, of making that my career, but “translation work” turns out to be a contradiction in terms, unless you know Chinese and want to translate technical manuals.
So we moved to Brazil. And that night, at the restaurant that used to be a dive bar, we ate too much; we drank too much. The chef was famous. The meal was expensive. My husband, reviewing the bill, said: “The bank’s paying for our flight home at Christmas.” It was a private joke now—any time we spent money, we recalled something the bank was paying for. If we dined out after my husband returned from a business trip elsewhere in Brazil, he would say: “Per diem.” As we left the restaurant and passed the maître d’, my husband said, “Valeu.” It was what people said after a meal. It meant: Worth it.
They came out of nowhere. They—three of them, boys. They hadn’t come out of nowhere, of course, but we didn’t see them until it was too late. “O.K.? O.K.?” the boy who was holding a knife in my face said.
The security people at the bank had given a briefing during our first week. The man who spoke was short, ridiculously muscled, ex-police. Something he said lodged in memory: You have to remember it’s a transaction; you want to end it as fast as possible. My husband and I joked that the briefing should have been called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Robbery Victims.”
Two boys worked on my husband—wallet, watch, phone. They searched his pockets by hand. Later, I thought of one’s helplessness during a medical examination. They told us what to do, how to behave, and we obeyed. The boy with the knife pulled the strap of my purse over my head. He had bloodshot eyes, wrists like old rope; he couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
“Aliança,” one of the other boys said. He meant my husband’s wedding band; I usually left mine at the apartment, on the advice of the ex-policeman. They were favela boys, dressed raggedly, seething with adrenaline and desperation. It was lucky for the boys that my husband spoke Portuguese—or lucky for my husband, or lucky for me. No foreigner without Portuguese would have known the meaning of “aliança.”
Luck—the part of life you don’t control. Or: you make your own luck. I can see both sides of that one.
The boy with the knife went through my husband’s wallet and took out the cash. He wasn’t satisfied. He threw the wallet to the pavement. “Tem mais,” he said. It meant: You have more.
He put his hand on my shoulder. I was now a prop in the argument he was having with my husband; he gestured with the knife between my husband and me, saying things I didn’t understand. While this was happening my mind was silent, empty. I didn’t scream. I nodded when words were spoken in my direction. When I thought of it later, my mind ran to the safety of cliché. I was petrified. My heart was in my throat. But it was already a cliché: poor, dark-skinned street kids robbing rich, white-skinned foreigners—it was a script other people had performed on countless nights before this. Two of the boys were suddenly moving away with my husband, taking him somewhere, leaving me and the one boy alone. “O.K.?” he said to me. “O.K.?” I was scared out of my mind.
You heard stories in São Paulo of robberies that went badly. People were killed. People who resisted what was happening, people who were too slow to hand over the car keys, people who failed to follow the script. That was the ex-policeman’s first piece of advice regarding the habits of highly effective robbery victims. Don’t resist.
The lights of a car blazed suddenly across the boys’ thin bodies. The sound of tires, other voices. It was enough to spook them. They ran. As he turned, the boy with the knife shoved me, and I fell to the ground. I closed my eyes and took a breath. I heard the sound of cheap plastic clapping on stone, going the other way, flip-flops.
My husband was there, lifting me, hugging my body to his. “I didn’t think,” he said.
I could see the light of the restaurant’s door, people going in and out, in sight of where we just were robbed. I was empty. I could have stood in the same spot forever, empty. Moments ago we had been paying a check.
“You were leaving,” I said.
“They were taking me to an A.T.M. They wanted me to take out more money,” he said.
“Then what would have happened?”
The next day we went to a police station. I knew at once there was no point. The city was too large, and there were too many boys, too much everything. My husband told the story, made a report. They asked him to provide a list of what was stolen. Wallet, brown, leather, brand unknown. Purse, black, leather, Dolce & Gabbana. Men’s watch, Burberry. Mobile phone, Samsung. Digital camera, Nikon. Cash, amount unknown. Wedding band, gold.
I wrote to Helen. Within hours, she wrote back:
That sounds god-awful. Of course I imagine they were black, and I imagine this somehow makes you feel worse about what happened. Don’t. Don’t think about it one more second.
Helen had also left New York during the previous year. She had a different set of reasons and went to Washington—a job, putting distance between herself and an ex-boyfriend, a general hunger that she had. Helen was my Republican friend. She said and thought things I would never say and rarely thought. She possessed a kind of Ayn Rand ruthlessness that troubled me but which I also admired. I replied:
Only one of the boys was black.
The cement vastness of São Paulo, seen from above, was otherworldly. Overgrown crops of high-rise condominiums extended endlessly under a pale yellow haze of polluted air, towers nuzzled together with tombstone snugness. Our neighborhood was south of Parque Ibirapuera, new money. The money aged as you went north; and then, farther north, the money disappeared. Poverty radiated outward to the edges of the city. At some point, driving around São Paulo, you crossed from the first world into the third world. Sometimes this happened in the space of a single block. Everywhere they were putting up more luxury high-rise condos, crushing to dust older buildings that had outlived their usefulness to the rich. I saw beggars and drug addicts going in and out of decaying structures in the last days before demolition. Creative destruction —that’s the polite way we have of putting it now.
The building we lived in was called Maison Monet. That delicate name belied the reality that it was a fortress. You passed through two locking gates at the entrance. There were cameras in the garage, in the elevators. At night, an armed guard, always well-dressed. The building had twenty-eight stories of floor-through apartments, a pool, a phalanx of doormen. The penthouse and its residents were a mystery; I never saw anyone push the button for the top floor. The features of the building were the product of fear, a set of fears that New Yorkers generally didn’t have anymore; New York had been tamed, but São Paulo was hairy with crime. We heard stories of apartment invasions, teams of men with guns. Men with guns swept through restaurants, hotels, they took everything. I thought about this every time I left the apartment, and the fact that I thought about it, that I was now a person who imagined the worst, bothered me more than the fear itself. The bank subsidized our apartment in São Paulo so that it cost no more than what our apartment in New York had cost, a difference of almost a thousand dollars a month. Here was one measure of my husband’s professional value.
I was able to track my husband’s phone over the Internet. There it was: a dot on the map, in a far northern zone of the city, impoverished and intimidating. I showed my husband. “Whoever that is, it’s not those kids,” he said. “And I already filed the insurance claim.” I zoomed in, and the digital map approached the limit of its resolution. The dot—an exact, real-time location, complete with geocoordinates—seemed like a promise, but I had the feeling that if I were to physically move toward it, it would simply move away from me.
We told our Brazilian friends about the robbery. Everyone cooed with sympathy and recognition: it was as if we had passed some test of admission. “They normally rob you with guns in São Paulo,” Marcos said. “Rio is knives,” Iara said. We laughed. They had stories of their own. Crime