Feast Days

I worked for Claudia; I was her employee. She had other employees. This was a category of people in her life, the category I belonged to. I saw the housekeeper when I came to the apartment. Days for Claudia’s housekeeper began very early and ended very late. She arrived in darkness and left in darkness. I was paid more by the hour but was involved much less intimately in Claudia’s life than the housekeeper, a woman who bought groceries and changed the linens and walked the two dogs and polished the frames of the family photographs; and yet I was the one who came by way of the social elevator, like a guest. Claudia never required me to use the service elevator—which the housekeeper surely never had to be told that she was expected to use. The difference, I supposed, was that I also lived in an apartment like Claudia’s. She was indeed an attractive woman.

Marcos paid me in envelopes. Claudia folded bills around her thumb and then handed them to me. In one case the money was invisible, in the other it was unregarded.

It was work whose purpose was to relieve boredom rather than to earn a living—which made it not work at all, but a pastime.

Sometimes my husband met me after work for a drink at a boteco near Maison Monet. It was on the corner, by a frozen river of traffic, the chairs arranged carelessly on the sidewalk. The neighborhood men clustered there in the evenings, eating pastéis and bolinhos, while the owner himself brought out more bottles of Antarctica beer. Some nights musicians would set up inside and play songs of old Brazil. The men at the tables talked and talked. It was a country of never-ending social obligation, social approach. We knew the owner—the bar had been his father’s, it had been in business fifty years. Passengers in cars stuck in traffic would roll down the windows and chat with the men at the tables, and one of the men would hand over a glass, a sip of cold beer before the light changed, a fleeting scene under the city glow of dusk. Evenings: the ashtrays quickly filled up, and the owner came around to replace them.

“Although usually you come home much later than this.”

“I wouldn’t say usually.”

“You’re frequently absent.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.”

“Let me say it differently, then. This is nice, being here with you like this. I wish it happened more often.”

“The reason I stay late isn’t that I don’t want to be here.”

“But you like what the late hours signify. You’re central to the enterprise. Without you, the ship would sail off course.”

“I want to be good at my job, yes.”

“My point is that you already miss things.”

“I wouldn’t miss anything important. Not something truly important.”

Brazilians loved to tell you about New York City. They had been there, they hadn’t been there, and in any case they had glowing reviews. Here I am referring to rich Brazilians. Everything is so organized, they said. Everything works so well there, they said. They would all live there if they could.

After a lesson at his office, Marcos gave me a ride. It wasn’t the direction he would go normally, but he had a dinner in Brooklin; my husband was at a dinner as well, somewhere else. “Blindado,” I said, touching the leather detailing on the inside of the door. Bulletproof. I’d learned the word from the signs hanging at every car dealership—bulletproofing your vehicle was the standard practice. But Marcos corrected me: his car was unproofed. “If you have it, they notice you. It is not a good idea unless you are already a target. I don’t want to be asking for attention. People here have cars that are much more …” He didn’t have the word he wanted in English. I supplied it: “Flashy.” “Flashy,” he said, taking possession of the term. “Yes. This is what I want to avoid.”

I learned that the name of my neighborhood came from the Tupi-Guarani word for lie. Apparently, there was an epic poem written in the late eighteenth century—which, I was assured, all Brazilians once knew by heart—in which the word was used as the name of a female character. She was symbolic, the incarnation of false love.

My husband invited me to join him at an airline-industry trade fair. It was part of an annual convention. I’d never been to a convention of any kind and was curious. For centuries conventional pertained simply to any agreement between parties, to coming together, and only in later usage did it swerve into synonymy with unoriginal, and then boring. He said there would be cocktails.

The booths were like little stages: elevated, illuminated, gleaming with expensive chrome surfaces. Those booths cost money—you have to buy to sell. There were booths for tarmac guys, engine-part guys, emergency lighting system guys. I admired a booth that belonged to a designer of cabin interiors. A quartet of airplane seats was on display to show off the company’s work. The lighting was soft and invitational. Everything about it was the opposite of actually being on an airplane. Passing conventiongoers stopped to regard the seats as if they were art.

He hadn’t lied about the cocktails. At many of the booths, women dressed like private escorts mixed caipirinhas and chatted with the men who approached. Men wandered the convention floor solo, with the verve of partygoers. The women moved in groups and seemed less sure of themselves.

From the far end of the hall, I heard shouting—a sound growing, something happening, but I couldn’t see what it was. My husband was elsewhere. I went in the direction of the noise and arrived in time to see a group of men in matching blue jackets celebrating. They gave the impression of a tribe. People nearby smiled, the way spectators smile at a winner in a casino. I had no idea. I was the anthropologist, missing information. There were drinks at a nearby booth, and I went there. A girl gave me a caipirinha and a man who was standing nearby spoke to me in Portuguese. I smiled, out of instinct, which must have encouraged him; he kept going even as I failed to understand almost anything he said. His face was tanned, shining. I detected a kind of spoiled masculinity in him, a negative current in whatever he was saying. He talked ceaselessly, as if he would lose me the second he paused for breath. I knew that at any moment he would begin to touch me. I moved away. He never stopped talking, and I never stopped smiling.

“Why are we here? Why are you here?”

“You know. Meeting people.”

“To what end?”

“You never know who you’re going to meet.”

“Networking.”

“Networking.”

“You’re fishing for clients. Investment opportunities.”

“I’m interested in certain indicators about the future of Brazilian aviation that will drive specific portfolio decisions.”

“So you’re spying.”

“Spying is a pretty melodramatic word for what I’m doing. I’m listening. I’m collecting information. I’m not being secretive about it—I’m giving out business cards. I’m here to read signs. I get paid to predict the future. You’re making fun of me.”

“There’s a sign,” I said.

The sign said: COMO MONETIZAR SUAS RELAÇÕES. I wanted to ask them about it—I would have liked to know how to monetize my relationships. At the booth were two women, wearing absurd dresses and holding pamphlets. I owned shirts that were longer than the dresses those women wore. They looked like women who knew how to monetize relationships.

I said this to my husband and he laughed. He also did an admirable job of restraining himself from staring at the women’s legs.

Respectable Brazilian newspapers published reports on actresses who had recently disrobed on camera. The actresses gave interviews about it, about what it was like to be naked, about the regimes of fitness and diet they used to prepare. The newspapers faithfully debunked rumors of body doubles, because it would have been tragic to learn that the actress who was naked on screen wasn’t the same actress who was giving an interview about it.

De: a privative. Some knowledge is more monetizable than other knowledge.

Brazilians bought more plastic surgery than anyone else in the world. There was an epidemic of fake tits, and among men the vogue was calf implants, apparently. Women danced in the Carnaval parades naked, or as good as naked—they wanted their pictures in the newspapers. This was considered completely normal behavior. In my life, I had seen so many pairs of other women’s breasts on television and in movies; a naked pair of breasts was now as common a sight as an old man waiting at a bus stop. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass provided the template for society—men wearing suits, women wearing nothing. There was now the presumption of female nudity. You could tell a man was disappointed when a television show didn’t have some breasts, as if this were a breach of contract.

At Claudia’s: “I have to go mother. Mother —I may use it as a verb also, yes?”

Her daughter had forgotten something. Claudia needed to go out and rescue her child from the absence of whatever it was she forgot. I was instructed to wait for her return. I was thirsty, and felt that Claudia would want me to help myself to a glass of water. I drank the water. Then I walked down the hallway. It did not seem like something I would ordinarily do, prowling. I heard noise coming from one of the rooms.

It was Claudia’s teenage son, sitting in front of a computer screen. I saw the jagged fumbling of video footage, heard a subverbal human sound, before he realized I was behind him and closed the browser’s window. I assumed he’d been watching pornography. He didn’t seem embarrassed. He said nothing and after a moment opened the browser again. “You can watch if you want,” he said.

A crowd surged, seethed. I saw the anger in people’s faces. They carried signs, the writing in Arabic. The presence of police in military gear and the low quality of the video generated the expectation of violence. “You want to find the cell phone videos to know what it was really like,” Claudia’s son said. He spoke good English, better than his mother’s. I went toward him, the screen.

I asked if what we were seeing was Egypt. “No,” he said, “Tunisia. Egypt is next.”

We watched videos. They had no beginnings and no ends, broken shards of protest activity. Everything happened in medias res. In one video, somebody collided with the man holding the camera—the cell phone—and it fell, and for the next ten seconds we watched the shuffling of feet, oddly peaceful, like a herd of cattle in a pen. The video suggested a way of contemplating an event: to shear it totally of context; to divorce it from narrative; to isolate it like bacteria on a slide. There was only this moment of failing, swimming focus, both calm and delirious, somehow authoritative. The caption gave the place and date, nothing else: “Cairo, 28 January.” The person who made the video and uploaded it to the Internet had fished out a single moment from the stream of time, a moment that now had no way back to the stream from which it came.

Claudia’s son’s name was Luciano. He had attended an expensive private school, a school with a reputation, and now he was supposed to be studying for the university entrance exams. He was enrolled in a preparatory class, the cursinho. The exams meant everything in Brazil among a certain caste; he had failed once already. I knew, from what Claudia told me during our lessons, that Luciano’s interests in life were inchoate. She spoke as a mother, concerned. Claudia said she did not know his friends, and only a couple of years ago he didn’t behave like this. Something had changed for him. He was seventeen. I asked what signs she was seeing, what troubled her. “The books he is reading are not the books he has to read for his exams,” Claudia said.

The boy I found wasn’t reading books at all; he was watching videos of revolutions on the other side of the world. Luciano’s hair was long, falling in rich black curls, he had dark hands. “So this is what interests you,” I said. He didn’t respond. I left him with his videos, the multiple chat windows he had open; he typed without looking at his fingers. I wasn’t alarmed. I had the sense that he was a boy, doing boy things, poking around in weird holes. Claudia was a mother. Mothers worry. An interest in videos of the Arab Spring made sense to me—a seventeen-year-old wants to see evidence of people in the world whose actions have consequences beyond a score on an exam, a status update, whose lives are not bound by the same set of rules. The bedroom smelled humidly of boy, boyhood, a sweetish smell of skin on which sweat had formed and dried and formed again, as though he hadn’t gone out in days.

Notwithstanding my new job as an English tutor, I continued my own study of Portuguese. During our lessons Fabiana would deplore the state of Brazilian politics. It was clear to me that her disdain for the ruling party was the result of love that had soured. She was a passionate woman. She had fierce attachments to individual politicians. She wanted to love them, and when love failed, she had nowhere to turn but hate. Politics mixed with the finer points of language. She could veer from the Workers’ Party to the problem of false cognates in a single sentence. “Fui decepcionada,” she would say, meaning not that she had been deceived, but that she had been disappointed, as only a lover can be. She was fond of the language teacher’s old warning about “false friends,” an injunction I remembered from as far back as sixth-grade French. I faithfully corrected my own clients when they said they were pretending to buy birthday gifts for their wives.

“Anyway.”

“Anyway, what I’m hearing—you wouldn’t believe it. The money. Where it comes from, where it’s going. And everyone knows. It’s a way of life here. After a while you assume the worst.”

“Your bank is part of this?”

“No, I’m talking about the internal practices of other companies, their relationships with government. Governments, plural. What we do is watch what happens. Understand the lay of the land. It’s routine surveillance.”