Lost in Translation.

It is my firm belief that if you read the ‘Romance’ section of the Lonely Planet’s Brazilian-Portuguese phrasebook in one sitting, you can perceive the shadowy form of an entire self-contained narrative behind the latticework of chat-up lines, rejections and sexual instruction. And here’s the rub: the narrative is a tragedy – a perfectly condensed, miniature tragedy of misunderstanding, frustration and disappointment.

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São Paulo’s Continuous Present.

One of the many imponderable aspects of living in São Paulo is how fiercely proud its inhabitants are of their home-town. When you first move here, you can perhaps be forgiven for wondering why this is. Unlike its nearby cousin and arch-rival, Rio de Janeiro, it is miles from the sea, lacks an enormous fresh-water lagoon, retains very few of its picturesque old buildings and has almost no open spaces. And yet Paulistas remain adamant: their city is not merely the equal of Rio, it is superior.

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Mantiqueira Notes

You leave the city just as the storm hits. Brown rivers cut the roads in half, sudden lakes form and filthy gouts of water boil up through the tarmac. You join a convoy of vehicles which weaves in and out between the rising waters, through newly deserted bairros and under bridges where the motoboys and pedestrians with broken umbrellas wait out the rain. 

Dusk falls as you enter the countryside. The interstate swoops up and down, cutting a path between toy-town hills folded up like a rucked carpet.

The moon climbs between high ridges of cloud and people stand patiently by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere for buses which might be one, two or thee hours late, or not come at all. Out here patience is merely one of many daily acts of faith.

The further you go, the emptier it gets. By the time it’s properly dark, there’s nothing for miles, then you pass the dim-lit sign for a farm or roadhouse, and you wonder how they survive so far from anything. Two hours later you’re pushing your little car round the switchbacks that lead into the hills, and twenty minutes after that you pull up at the gates to the compound. When you get to the house, you crack the door and the car, sealed since Sao Paulo, fills immediately with the sweet, rotten smell of the jungle, the electric drone of cicadas.

That night, the wind picks up then dies away by three. The cicadas stopped hours ago, without you noticing, and from the bed you can see a single blue star above the shoulder of the mountain, between reefs of cloud.

Tonight is the kind of night where no one sleeps, and when you do you feel like you’re sleeping outside, and when you dream, you dream that you’re still in the room. Outside on the lawn, among the ordinary things made strange by moonlight, stands the tall dark pillar of a man watching you. When you wake again, or think you’ve woken, he is closer, and closer again, until eventually he’s standing over you. But this is a dream, so you cannot wake and whatever fear you feel is felt dimly, as if it were happening to someone else or through sound-proofed glass.

The next day, after breakfast, you go for a walk with your son to collect pine cones for the fire. The whole circuit takes an hour and you come back with your shopping bag full. On the way, you stop at a waterfall to show your son the sight of butterflies pirouetting around each other in a column of sunlight. You wonder why they like to dance in the sunlight; maybe it’s good for their wings.

After lunch two birds of prey, like kestrels but bigger, land in the bare branches of a dead tree and take turns shrieking at the landscape while the other pants and preens its feathers. Later in the afternoon, a toucan settles in the same tree and paces up and down its branch, croaking and ruffling its plumage like a country magistrate.

At dusk, as we’re sitting outside on the veranda with Lucas and the flying ants are rising up from the lawn, a humming bird darts into a pink-flowering shrub by the veranda and hovers there, sucking nectar and then piping loudly in what sounds like frustration before darting off again, incredibly fast.

When it rains, the cicadas stop. And start up again afterwards. The cicadas sound like rain, and the rain sounds like the sea. It pours in silver runnels from the eaves and the mimosa by the gate.

After it rains, the air is clear and still. Through the trees the last light of the setting sun leaps out in streamers of white gold. The hills recede down the valley, each one a paler blue. Close inspection reveals that the last hill is not a hill at all, but a reef of dove-grey cloud. As you move around the house getting ready to close up for the night, another skein of low-lying cloud drifts through the valley. Eventually it’s so thick the whole mountain vanishes, then reappears, then vanishes again. It is hard to shut the doors and leave behind such a beautiful sight.

The creatures on the roof are silent all weekend, but start up again on Monday night, playing games of chase, holding their AGM, arguing the endless, involuted politics of wild things.

The next day you all go for a walk up a road you haven’t taken yet. You pass the house with the strange pool and the barking dog, some workmen, an abandoned house with branches all over the roof and weeds in the drive. Further up the road there is a green water tank about twenty metres high with a rickety service ladder. You climb the ladder while beside you the tank clangs and thunks with its internal processes. Its sides are hot to the touch. At the top you take some pictures that entirely fail to convey how high up you were, and consequently how heroic. 

In the late afternoon you have a barbeque. The fire takes well and you put the meat, peppers and kebabs on. There are dark clouds in the distance and the occasional thunder. It gets closer until the first droplets drive mother and child indoors. You stay out to finish the barbeque under a golf umbrella you found in a junk room. Every time you lean away the rain makes the coals sizzle and smoke. It thickens to a deluge and the thunder is directly overhead. Flowerbeds fill with muddy water and the rain sizzles off the veranda. Your back is wet and cold, your front super-heated.

You bring the food indoors and start your son’s bedtime routine. A story is read, a bath is given, a feed is had until sleep comes. Outside the rain has stopped and thick mist has rolled in, obscuring everything but the nearest trees and flower beds. The farther trees are strange in the mist. Frogs croak and grumble. 

The next day you go to the shops. When you get back, you have a cup of tea while your son naps upstairs. As you’re sitting there a lizard walks into the garden. It is massive and prehistoric, with ancient eyes, a bulging throat sac and the toothless mouth of an old man without his dentures. Its skin is black, white and yellow, but mostly black. Its body is about a foot and a half long and its tail would easily double that if it weren’t for the fact that it has been neatly cut off about half way down. You all watch each other for five minutes or so, it blinking occasionally but otherwise not moving a muscle. Eventually your curiosity gets the better of you and you edge closer. It starts and backs away. Its claws are vicious, sweeping curves that drag through the grass. After backing away, it stops then rushes at you until it stops about three feet away, its forearms raised, its head angled to one side, studying you. You wander if it’s going to attack; certainly it seems to be trying to intimidate you. Neither of you fancies trying to grapple with that solid trunk, that elephant’s skin. Eventually, feeling vindicated, the lizard stalks off, its slow side-to-side slithering crawl quite casual. It disappears over the edge of the terrace and you go to see where it’s gone. You watch as it crawls down the slope, drops from one terrace to another, lands clumsily in a leaf pile and is gone. 

N.B. Portal da Mantiqueira is a beautiful little nature reserve-cum-holiday park near Santo Antonio do Pinhal and Campos do Jordão in the interior of São Paulo State. 

Impossible Brasil.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that America and Brazil have a lot in common: they both gained independence and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to embrace constitutional democracy; they both had a westward race for land and resources; they both have an uncomfortable relationship with slavery and their indigenous population; and they're both bloody huge. But Brazil doesn’t feel like the US. In the States, you somehow get the feeling that the immigrants have occupied the land so completely that they’ve effaced all but a few government-sponsored scraps of its pre-history; in my Hollywood-shaped imagination, every square inch of the U.S. is occupied by vast wheat fields, homely New England woods, Thoreau-style national parks, suburban enclaves like the ones in E.T. and the counterweight urban sprawls of the east and west coasts.

Brazil doesn’t feel quite so domesticated, so orderly and tame. In Brazil, it feels like the cities are a crust floating on top of impossible depths. Perhaps it’s the jungle which does that. A quick search reveals that Brazil is the fifth most populous country in the world, yet the population of Brazil is massively urbanised, with 78% living in the cities, and most of the big cities clingingfor safety to the Atlantic coastal region. Behind them waits the endless jungle, Heart of Darkness-style, and the equally endless plantations of corn, soy, tobacco and coffee which help power the Brazilian economy.

That sense of strangeness, of a wildness only partially contained, hits you in different ways. Sometimes it’s seeing a beautiful Indian place name on the highway, like Pindamonhangaba, Taubaté or Itaquaqucetuba. Sometimes it’s hearing a song you love in the morning sun of a strange café and having that sudden vertiginous glimpse of how far the inchoate strands of music and ideas can travel, across the jungle and the mountains and the sea. Sometimes it’s walking into a graveyard and finding a dead black hen with a cigar in its mouth, sacrificed as part of a macumba ritual, that strange, catch-all term for the syncretism of Catholicism, Candomblé and other imported and indigenous religions. Sometimes it’s the way you simply can’t tell where a Brazilian originally came from, whether Europe, Asia, Africa, or Brazil, combined with the fact that most Brazilians refuse to cling to and define themselves by their immigrant past like so many of their north American cousins.

Another way to try and convey the sheer enormity and sense of dislocation which Brazil induces in a foreigner is to consider how many languages contiguously evolved in Europe, and how many distinct cultural traditions these languages represent; all those revolutions and rivalries, those horrors and wonders; Norse gods, King Arthur, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jim Davidson, all crammed into a tiny, seething patchwork of warring principalities and fiefdoms and republics and picturesque scenes. Then you have to juxtapose that image with the fact that the whole of Europe fits inside Brazil, and yet Brazil has only one language and one overarching culture within which are swirled all the races, cultures, religions and music of all the millions of people who immigrated here and those who lived here for however many thousands of years (well, about eight thousand year) before the Europeans came.

It is this which makes Brazil so mind-boggling: the fact that it has so much richness and strangeness, but can never hope to reconcile all the various narratives. That’s not a bad thing. But it is, I don’t know, confusing; there’s always so much to take in, there are so many contradictions, so many examples of terrible inequality alongside wonderful, disarming instances of kindness, so many maddening incomprehensible accretions of old Brazil left behind by the glacial shift of history for you to trip over as you walk through modern streets. Perhaps that is both the tragedy and salvation of Brazil: it is too big to know itself, but it's big enough and strange enough to absorb the contradiction. 

B.O.U.R.G.E.O.I.S

I have decided that I love the middle classes. After years being ashamed of my bourgeois status because of the many abject twats I knew who were middle class and all the possibly fake working class people who inverse-sneered at my accent, my bag of toffees and my taste for scrumping, I can confirm that I have embraced with open arms my non-humble, non-privileged background. It’s not just me, either. I’m a zealous convert: I think everyone should be middle class.

Now hold on. Before you hate me, allow me to explain. I don’t mean that we should all be coveting semi-detached houses in Chiswick. I mean that we should all be aspiring to the middle ground. See, when you’re a kid, you feel ashamed of being stuck in the middle; you envy the working classes their inviolable cause and you envy the rich their inviolable entitlement. But the bourgeoisie are great precisely because they occupy the middle.

It’s no coincidence that Buddhism, a religion based on maximizing happiness, is known sometimes as the middle path. That’s where everyone should be, you see, sharing the middle ground. That’s where I imagine we'd all be happiest, with the same amount of education, the same buying power, the same access to nice things, the same opportunity to determine our futures, the same heightened awareness and, hopefully, the same sense of conscience.

The problem with Brazil, if I may venture to say so, is that there isn’t enough of a middle class. As I have said elsewhere, society here is polarised between the very poor and the very rich, with a huge gulf in between. Into this gap, this non-existent middle-ground, fall the few professionals who think more progressively, but they seem to be actively squeezed out or antagonised by the inability of the economy in its present state to accommodate their needs.

Things are changing, however; the working classes are getting more and more strident in their demands for proper jobs, rights and education. They are improving themselves. In short, they want to be middle class in the purely abstract sense of wanting to have enough equality to determine their own futures (which, ironically, is something the middle classes of the first world may be losing, but that’s another story). The rich of Brazil, however, seem to be seeking to prevent this transition, because the elevation of some people makes others want it for themselves, and suddenly all the serving classes, all their babas and drivers and maids, don’t want to be babas and drivers and maids anymore; they want to go to college and become librarians, beauticians and teachers. In that order. And then where would the rich Brasileiros be? Using eHow to learn to boil an egg.