Feast Days

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 for. I wrote everything on the inside cover of the novel I was reading—Operation Shylock, in which Philip Roth discovers that someone named Philip Roth is causing increasing amounts of trouble in Israel—and then we both stared, mesmerized, now with more anxiety than excitement: it looked like a list of debts.

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 was a source of anxiety among the upper classes in São Paulo. Until you became so rich that you literally flew everywhere by helicopter.

At dinner, a conversation about money. Brazil’s economy, the mess it was in. Everything had gone so well for so long—and now the forecast was disaster. Our friends blamed the president, the party. Marcos worked with my husband and was married to Iara, and they knew João from somewhere. It was difficult to become friends with Brazilians—someone would suggest a time and not a place or a place and not a time—but after several months we were somehow still going to dinner with these people. They never laughed when they talked about politics.

Food appeared in portions so small they looked decorative, zoned on white plates, squares of black slate. Each plate-thing was accompanied by a lecture from the waiter: the per-dish speaking time was almost equal to the per-dish eating time. This was the tasting, the degustação. I didn’t make an effort to understand when the waiter talked; I wanted to know as little as possible about what I was putting in my mouth, to be totally unprepared. I wanted no context. In some cases, I couldn’t tell what the ingredients were, even after chewing and swallowing. Degust and disgust have the same root—gustare, to taste—but opposite meanings. Ignorance: that’s the word for what I wanted.

Dinner with Brazilians—the first courses arrived at the table after nine o’clock. We ate alien forms from the sea, Galician octopus, slate-pencil urchins, a funny-looking gratin of salt cod. This chef was famous, too, a woman. Late in the evening, she emerged from the kitchen, observed by the diners, admired, radiating gentle authority. She was young, roughly my age. People went to her, and she received her guests like an ambassador, calm and generous. We ate suckling pig. We ate pastes and jellies and cold soups made from native Brazilian fruits. I couldn’t disguise my dislike of certain things. My husband talked about every dish as if he were making notes for a review. Since moving to São Paulo, he had become one of those gastro-creeps. Food, as a subject for conversation, was for me on par with pornography. I wished that for him food were more like pornography: something to be enjoyed privately and not discussed as if it were art. I’m sure there is such a thing as better pornography and worse pornography, but you aren’t supposed to go on about it.

And we ordered the wine pairings, of course. My husband insisted on this, as if in life one thing were always destined to be paired with another. I had as little interest in talking about the wine as I had in talking about the food, but I enjoyed drinking it. The waiters were happy to top off the glass of whatever they had just poured and I had just finished, gratis. “I’m having the wine pairing with the wine pairing,” I said.

João was talking about soccer and asked my husband something about the rules of American football. My husband was in love with speaking Portuguese. I followed the conversation with more success than I participated in it, and I wondered if this made our Brazilian friends think of me as someone who was quiet, who let her husband do the talking. We draw our power from language. You aren’t yourself in a foreign tongue. I can see why some people find this liberating.

I preferred to learn Portuguese by reading the newspapers. In the written language I could decode a number of words from their similarity to French. Live conversation was altogether different; I often found myself plunging into a state of zombielike incomprehension. Learning a language is a nonlinear affair. A moment of triumph often follows a crisis of confidence. Or else, after days of utter mastery, as your brain processes the language without that laborious sensation of actually processing it, you might find yourself suddenly suffering from language panic, total verb collapse, making errors of conjugation like someone blindfolded striking at tennis balls. You reach for a preposition from the shelf in your mind and find nothing there, absolutely nothing, no language whatsoever.

There had been a news event that day. Members of a homeless-rights group were occupying an unused building owned by a telecom giant. In Portuguese, the occupation was called an “invasion.” Police blasted the occupiers out with water cannons; there were injuries. João was the one who mentioned it. He disapproved, but at first I misunderstood the source of his disapproval—the actions not of the police but of the homeless-rights group.

Marcos concurred: The government tolerates these people, he said. They let them do this business. Eventually they use the police, but for political reasons they don’t arrest anyone after it is over. It is illegal what these people do. It is a kind of theft to use a building that doesn’t belong to you. In the world, there is legal and illegal, there is not some third thing.

Iara spoke, his wife. “The only time a Brazilian will wait at a red light is when there is a camera,” she said. She spoke in English; she wanted me to appreciate her point. “In America, even in the middle of the night, you wait at the red lights. Marcos never waits at the red lights.”

Iara, I had loved her at once, she had a taste for irony. Her life had a vague glamour. She knew artists. She seemed to belong professionally to the gallery circuit of São Paulo without, as far as I could tell, actually making any money at it. That was the sort of thing that impressed me.

I heard tales of killings in our neighborhood. A kid who was closing up a café at the end of the night, shot by a robber. Three guys, connected guys, executed as they left a nondescript restaurant where they went for whiskey and cigars once a week; maybe a gambling debt. This happened just up the street. One of the doormen told me the next day as I was coming back to the apartment. The killers shot only the men they were trying to shoot, men they had reason to kill; they even warned off a waiter before opening fire. This information, when the doorman offered it, was intended to reassure me.

I spent a lot of time inside the apartment. I didn’t have much of a choice. Even if I’d spoken Portuguese well enough, and even if there had been something for me to do, professionally, I didn’t have the right kind of visa. I was a double major, cultural anthropology and dead languages. I was a net loss, in the idiom of my husband’s industry. Or maybe I was a write-off. Housewife—I couldn’t bring myself to use the word. Nor could my husband, I noticed. There really wasn’t anywhere pleasant to walk.

“If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him in the head.”

This was late, he couldn’t sleep.

“You’ve never fired a gun in your life. You make fun of gun nuts.”

“He was holding a knife in your face. I wish I’d had the power at that moment to kill him.”

“No, you don’t. Then you would have killed someone.”

“My wife’s face,” my husband said.

What I did was look into other people’s homes. I had a name for it: The Life of Observation.

The glassy apartment buildings started to resemble aquariums. My neighbors floated around inside their aquariums, lifting babies, carrying bowls, watching T.V. They all had giant flat-screen televisions. I knew because I could see them: I could watch what they were watching. For important soccer matches they put out flags. By neighbors I mean the people who lived in nearby buildings—about the people who lived in our building, above us and below us, I knew little, only what could be inferred from the bump of children overhead or a moment of close-quarters elevator interaction. The servant class—housekeepers, nannies, dog walkers, cooks—spent much more waking time in the apartments than their employers did. From our balcony, sixteen stories above the ground, we had some enviable sight lines. Unobstructed, cinematic views of distant street corners, newsstands and pharmacies, the roofs and exposed white bellies of other apartment buildings, swimming pools, bedroom windows a half mile away; it was a sniper’s heaven. I didn’t shoot anyone. Instead I sat on the sofa, in the middle of my glass-wrapped living room, like an object in a vitrine, reading. The blades of a helicopter occasionally chopped around the air outside. When I grew bored, I tried reading in a different room, and soon ran out of rooms.

The living room windows gave a view of the flight path into the domestic airport. If I stood at the window for several minutes, I would see a plane making its final descent. I remembered noticing the sound of the planes when we first moved in, but my awareness of it had faded over time. I sometimes caught the scent of jet fuel’s hard cologne in the air.

Once a week a woman named Fabiana came to the apartment and gave me a Portuguese lesson. Cognates interested me because they were easy; I even invented cognates: “temptação,” for instance, or “boastar.” It was like rolling dice: once in a while I got what I wanted. “Aspiração” means what you think it means; so does “decadência.” But Fabiana knew what I was up to. She would flash a tragic look that said: You must stop believing you can get away with this. Fabiana herself had good, sturdy English, dry and smooth, with an accent almost like a Frenchwoman’s; it was the kind of accent that was paid for. Even her errors were perfect. Is it redundant to say that I saw price tags everywhere? I couldn’t remember if this had started because of my husband, or earlier.

“I work in finance,” my husband would say whenever someone asked about his job. He never said, “I’m an investment banker,” let alone gave the name of his bank. He was like a doctor who says, “I work in medicine.” Like a lifeguard who says, “I work in beaches.” I came to believe he used this formulation because he liked the mystery of it; he capitalized on enigma. You either knew what he meant or you didn’t. Secrets are important to men. Every man tells himself he could have been a spy in another life.